


Follow Your Compass

by Dobanochi



Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Police, American Politics, Class Differences, Drama, Dramedy, Established Relationship, F/M, Fantastic Racism, Gen, Inspired by Real Events, Moral Dilemmas, Police, Police Brutality, Politics, Racism, Some Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:15:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24958219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dobanochi/pseuds/Dobanochi
Summary: In the wake of nationwide conflicts between protesters and police, our two favorite Good Cops -- a career can-doer and a reformed conman -- have a frank discussion about whether their chosen line of work is actually as much of a force for good as they once thought it to be.***Sensitive Topic Warning*** Oneshot inspired by recent real-world events, and the question of how much two fictional Good Cops would allow themselves to participate in it.
Relationships: Judy Hopps/Nick Wilde
Comments: 52
Kudos: 27





	Follow Your Compass

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, friends and strangers. I'd like to just quickly reiterate that **this story does deal in sensitive topics** , as it was directly inspired by real-life events transpiring throughout the United States in the past few months (and the past few years), and furthermore that I make no claims that this is to replace nor contribute to any real-world discourse being had on the subject; this is merely to experiment with how two fictional police officers -- two characters who are designated Good Cops to the point that they're supposed to be suitable role models for children, no less -- would react if thrust in to our real-world conflict. I'll save the rest of my notes for the end. Thank you well.

“Follow Your Compass”

He said he wanted to talk when he got home. She certainly wanted to talk about the day’s events too, but she didn’t just want to sit around and wait for him. To be fair, he said he was going to be awhile because he was going to have a long talk with the chief in private, and on top of that he was going to be arranging his own way home. When you live together and work together, you carpool, one hundred percent of the time; it makes sense because you don’t expect to have a day of work that ends with one of you staying behind to chew out your boss for emotional damages, or whatever he was chewing out the chief for.

Heck, maybe he was walking home. It was a beautiful spring-cum-summer day, and assuming you weren’t allergic to the pollen flurrying through the air, one could hardly ask for a more picturesque day. Altogether it was the perfect weather to walk home after a long day of work and decompress, honestly probably a much more safe and responsible option than driving home distracted by frustration.

Then again, it was a long walk back to their house; not too impossibly far, it was an inner-ring neighborhood, but still. After four years on the force, she had saved up enough with her officer’s salary to buy herself a small house in a quaint older neighborhood heavily populated by city employees; among her neighbors were plenty of firefighters, transit workers, and cops, lots and lots of cops. But a house isn’t a home unless you have someone to share it with, so she asked her beat partner, with whom she had been exchanging increasingly less and less subtle hints over the years (and ultimately their “secret” relationship became the worst-kept secret on the force), if he would like to become her partner in a different sense of the word, officially, at which point they had to be assigned different partners as per a rule that police partners couldn’t be an item. They were still in that spot in terms of their status -- legal documents tabbed them as “domestic partners” -- and at the moment, they were fine with that arrangement. Some of the neighbors found it scandalous, especially the older set, but she was the local-hero cop who had saved the city a few years back and he was the reformed swindler who helped her do it, so if any of them had a problem with it, they could get lost. Their families were similarly shocked by the development, especially hers, but with time they came to understand that it wasn’t their call to make, and if tomorrow he suddenly had the guts to get on a knee before her and pull a small velvet box out of his back pocket, both of their families would probably be ready to handle it by now.

But she didn’t think such a thing would happen as soon as tomorrow, and quite honestly, she wouldn’t have been ready for it if it did. She knew he loved him, she did, but every so often something would come up that would reveal that they still saw certain things very differently. Things ranging from whether gangbangers were bad people or innocent victims of circumstance, to whether broccoli should be boiled or broiled, to whether they should even care about maintaining relationships with family members who didn’t approve of them, to whether or not there was Something above. Did every couple have these philosophical divides? Were these normal? Was the mature option to work together to resolve these differences, or to put these differences aside and love each other anyway, or, third option, to accept that they weren’t quite compatible with one another and leave the knot untied? She didn’t know the answer and at this point she was just hoping to have a random epiphany one of these days that would clear it all up for her. All she knew is that this question weighed heavily on her mind, and once a few years back around the time she moved in with him she had a really weird dream where she was pregnant with his child and between the inevitable fact that it would put her career on hold and the fact that she wasn’t sure that a hybrid baby could physically be born without killing her she didn’t think keeping it would have been the responsible option, but in this dream he was suddenly extremely religious (which was really weird because in reality he was an atheist, another thing her family took awhile to come to terms with as well as she herself) and he was vehemently against the idea of aborting the baby, health concerns be damned, to the point that when she put her foot down in the dream he just walked out of the apartment and never returned. And also in that dream half of their conversation was in... Portuguese, for some reason? Whatever, dream logic. She knew that such a thing would never happen quite like that (and not just because of the limits of biology), but that dream spooked her, and she still wondered if something  _ similar _ would transpire that would end with him making a similarly dramatic exit that would shake her with one heck of a case of déjà vu.

Even if he was walking home on this day where the immaculate weather seemed to be mocking the malcontent inhabitants of her nation, it would have been nice if he had actually told her that he was going to be hoofing it. All he had done was send her a text around the time she arrived home saying “I just left the station. Be home soon. Love ya.” Which was nice, but could it have killed him to be more specific? She was debating simply calling him on his cell phone, but much like how she didn’t just want to wait around for him to get home, she didn’t want her life to revolve around him. It wasn’t like she was married to the guy.

But it was also one of those things where she was absolutely convinced that if she started occupying herself with something constructive to fill time, boom, that would be the exact moment he came home. She could just feel that the universe was gonna pull that one on her. It was that kind of day.

Okay, fine. Tea. She could make tea. Whatever. She’d had to do a lot of projecting her voice over large and rowdy crowds today so she could certainly use it to soothe her throat. She didn’t own a teapot but she didn’t really need one since she was so used to making tea the bumpkin way: fill a measuring cup with water; microwave it for three minutes; then take a porous bag of shredded leaves on a string and dunk it in the water; dunk it again; dunk; dunk; dunk; dunk; dunk; dunk; dunk; dunk; your hot water is now brown and caffeinated. Congratulations, you have achieved tea.

She took her mug to the living room by the front door. Really? She did all that and he still didn’t magically appear at the least convenient possible time? She started sipping; well, he didn’t know how her day had been either, seeing as they had to work separately now, so she might as well replay the events in her head so she could rehearse what to tell him when he finally came home. Jeez, where to start? Well, for one thing, she knew going into work that day that it was going to be rough, but when she found out they were assigning everyone to--

_ Scrape, scrape. _ She heard a key turning in the front door’s deadbolt, then the lock in the knob. Of course as soon as she thinks of something she  _ actually _ ought to do before he gets home, he gets home. Of course that’s how it happened. Of course. Alright, apparently her side of the conversation was going to have to go unrehearsed. Perhaps that was for the best.

She didn’t even get up off the couch as she heard the locks disengaging; it was probably best to keep her distance for a time since she had no idea where he’d been. Then again, having to be in close proximity to a whole bunch of other people all day long was worrying enough with the current state of the world, so maybe she already had it and just didn’t know it yet.

The door opened and he stepped inside. He didn’t make eye contact as he closed the door behind him; maybe he didn’t see her, maybe he didn’t want to look at her just yet, but either way, he certainly looked frustrated, even if the only part of his face she could see was his eyes. She noticed he was wearing his street clothes. He had probably gotten changed at the station and left his uniform in the locker room; fair enough, on a day like today one could be forgiven if they didn’t want to roam the streets alone dressed as a cop. Besides, that redhead looked good in green, and somehow he could make a casual tie work without making it look like he was trying too hard. She waited until he took off his mask and folded it and shoved it into his back pocket before she addressed him.

“Hey,” she said softly.

The moment he looked up, she tossed him the bottle of hand sanitizer. He certainly wasn’t expecting it, and he botched the catch and fumbled it, the bottle dropping to the ground in such an improbable way that the cap popped off and a splotch of sanitizer landed on the carpet.

“Well… at least the carpet’s clean!” he said with a shrug and a forced-looking half-grin as he picked up the bottle, reassembled it, and squeezed some out into his palm.

“What took you so long?” she asked. “I’m not mad at you about it, I just wanna know.”

“I walked,” he answered stoically, shooting her a glance but otherwise keeping his eyes on his hands and arms.

“All the way from the station?” Yeah, she had hypothesized it, but she didn’t think he’d actually  _ do _ it.

“Had to,” he said as he kept lathering his paws, now giving her more frequent and extended glances. “I wasn’t gonna take a rideshare or a taxi with a stranger with the bubonic plague floating around… even if  _ he _ didn’t have it, after today, I coulda gotten it and given it to  _ him _ … or  _ her _ ; you know what I mean… Besides, in the words of a wise man, ‘any distance is walking distance if you’ve got the time,’ and you’d better believe I had the time today... Oh, and, y’know, they shut all the buses and subways down. That, too.”

“They what!?”

“You didn’t hear?” In his head, he had thought there was a fifty-fifty chance she was already privy to the news. “I thought you supported terrestrial radio; the deejays didn’t give you any news updates?”

“I drove home without the radio on,” she said morosely as she put her tea down on the end-table and got off the couch, murmuring as she walked over to him, “It’s been that kind of day…”

Whether or not it was a medically wise decision, they allowed themselves to hug it out. The petite little thing buried the side of her face into the spot where his chest met his stomach. He looked down to see that she looked absolutely defeated, not crying or anything, at least not yet, but he hoped that his embrace was giving her comfort. After a moment, she looked up at him, and saw him smiling softly down upon her, the first time he had smiled sincerely since he had come home, and she was glad that her embrace had given him comfort.

“But why would they shut all the transit down?” she implored him. “Was… there wasn’t a bomb threat or anything, was there!?”

“Oh, heavens, no. They did it to force the protesters to go home. And to trap the ones who wouldn’t. They were talking about it when I left the station. They weren’t making any bones about it.”

And she just stared at him for a second with no discernable emotions.

“And I got home just in time because they instituted a curfew,” he continued. “The official word was that it was to prevent people from spreading the Black Death -- so much for opening this state up, eh? -- but you just know that wasn’t actually why they did it.”

He still couldn’t attach an emotion to her look, at least not anything more specific than ‘ _ detached _ ’. She put her cheek against his chest again and stared into the space next to him.

“I… honestly was expecting a little more pushback than that from you,” he said, sounding uncharacteristically sheepish. “A little more disbelief.”

“No, no…” she murmured. “After today, I believe it.”

“We have much to discuss, don’t we?”

“We do. I’m just glad you’re home safe. So… how was your day?” She said this as she still hugged him with her face staring into negative space.

“Oh, I just spent that entire walk unpacking what happened to me today. If it’s alright with you, I don’t wanna hit the replay button again already. How was  _ your _ day?”

She looked up at him again. “I’ve just been sitting here wondering what happened to you all day.”

“And I’ve just been walking home for an hour wondering what happened to  _ you _ all day,” he said with that infernal slick-and-sly smile. “Ladies first.”

She sighed and released him from her embrace. “You’re such a gentleman,” she said as she made her way back to the couch.

He followed. “Hey, honey, I’ve been worried sick about  _ you _ all day, too. I mean, if you  _ really _ want me to go first, then alright--”

“No, no…” she insisted as they sat down on the couch. “Now I kind of want to get my turn over and done with; just… gimme a sec…” She reached for her tea and took a long sip with a pronounced gulp at the end, and as she did, he put his arm around her back and pulled her into himself. “Boy, I needed that. I had to do a lot of screaming today.”

“Take your time, take your time,” he said, almost cooing. “We’ve got all night to talk it out.”

“Thanks…” she said, holding her cup in her hands and staring off into space again. She put the mug down after a time and told herself that telling her story off-the-cuff would probably be the most authentic way, emotionally speaking. “Alright, so… you remember that I got assigned to the area by the library--”

“I do.”

“--and I’m there with a whole bunch of cops from precincts all over the city, I don’t know half these people, I don’t know  _ most _ of these people, and I think… if something bad  _ were _ to happen, and I needed to rely on my fellow cops to help me… whether I’m helping myself or someone else… I don’t know if I can trust them. And this was no time to make friends, so it’s not like I could… you know…  _ make _ time to get to know them and learn to trust them… and…  _ especially _ now… I  _ really _ can’t just tell myself that wearing the badge means they’re a good person…”

“I understand,” he reassured her. And he knew that she knew he understood, but he was also saying it to fill the dead air, to make sure they both knew the other was still there.

“And… a-a-and that wouldn’t have been such an issue if not for… if not for the orders we got. ‘Maintain the peace’? ‘Make sure things don’t get out of hand’? I-I mean… what does that mean? I mean, I  _ know _ what it means, but  _ what does it mean!? _ It can mean so many things, and… not all of them good things…”

“I hear ya,” he murmured, “Iii here ya.”

“The only thing specific is that the chief pulled me aside before we left and said that if anything got out of hand… that he trusted my leadership. And that’s why he was sending me to the front lines when they usually wouldn’t send a small woman like me out there. And you know me, as honored as I am that he trusts my leadership, I’m thinking that that’s incredibly bogus that they would treat small female officers that way, but then on the way there, the thought crosses my mind… is this… is this  _ really _ going to be something that’s going to get so… so  _ dangerous _ that they can’t even pretend that they think a small officer could hold their own? Are they  _ that _ worried for our safety?”

“Almost like their sexism was coming from a place of genuine concern?”

“Something like that, I still don’t know how to feel about it. And sure enough when we start gathering, I see female officers, and I see a few small male officers, but I can’t see any other small women besides me. Should I feel flattered I was good enough; should I feel offended that I was the only one--?  _ Both? _ Jeez, I still don’t know what to make of that.”

“I hear ya.”

“And we got there… what?... two hours before the protesters even showed up? And we stood around, waiting, decked out in our riot gear, and it was tense, and I thought to myself… okay, fine, there’s no immediate threat to our safety, I’m going to try to earn the trust of these strangers anyway. I-I tell myself… hey, even if I can’t rally the troops, I… I can at least lighten the mood. Right? I can make it so we’re not just a… just a  _ wall _ of scowling, angry…  _ soldiers _ . Like I felt like we were being sent to war against… gosh-knows-who, no directions, no leadership, just ‘see the enemy and take them out however you see fit,’ and I think… in this… ‘ _ war _ ’... I know what they’re protesting for. And I think they’re right. And I want my fellow cops to at least look friendly because I don’t want these protesters thinking we’re the bad guys… that there  _ are _ bad guys. It’s like this war they’re shoving us into is just… just a really…  _ really _ bad…  _ tragic _ … misunderstanding.”

“Very well-put,” he said. Even though she sounded like she was going to start crying any moment, she still hadn’t. He didn’t know whether to be proud that she wasn’t losing her composure so easily, or worried that she was withholding her true emotions. But as long as the only reason she wasn’t crying wasn’t because she had already depleted herself of tears before he got home.

“And I’m trying to be friendly to these other cops I’ve never met, cops I might never even meet again, and some of them warm up to me, but a lot of them…  _ most _ of them… they just… they just give me the same glares that they’re giving the protesters as they start filling up the streets. The same dirty looks I got at the precinct on my first day years back… it felt like I was starting from scratch.”

She looked up at him for a moment; he nodded wordlessly with pursed, pensive lips.

“And it was weird, because there were a lot of them who looked angry, but there were also a lot of them who looked…  _ afraid _ , just… spooked, worried. Like I said, it felt like we were being sent to war, and a lot of people looked like they were itching to hurt people, but still… a lot of them looked like they were afraid of  _ getting _ hurt. And that made me wonder… how many of these people who look so angry… are actually just putting on an angry face, because they’re afraid… of showing that they’re afraid?”

“That thought crossed my mind, too, today.”

“And… and I’ve gotta say… it didn’t start that bad. Because… the protesters show up… some people say things in a megaphone… and some people in the crowd are screaming at us, a few of them are even throwing stuff at us, soda bottles and fruit and stuff… but mostly… most of them were completely peaceful. They really were. And it’s not that I didn’t think there wouldn’t be a lot of peaceful people there, because… y-you know, I’ve worked protests before--”

“Not your first rodeo.”

“--and I’ve worked protests that got bad, like after the election, and I’ve worked protests against police brutality plenty of times in these last few years, but… a-a-and for a little bit, I thought I was able to make good of it! B-because I heard people start saying ‘hey, the media’s here, the news is here,’ and… and maybe this was… maybe this was self-serving of me, but… I remember the chief saying he trusted my leadership, so I decided to try to be a leader. So I made my way to the front of the brigade and I caught the attention of the news reporters… ‘cause you know, they remember who I am, and I stand out… so I get a hold of one of the reporters, and a few more move in, and I just tell them plain and simple that our city’s police department does not condone what those cops did halfway across the county, or what crooked cops might do in  _ any _ city in this country, and… and that we agree with the protesters in what they’re demanding and in them exercising their right to protest. And then… and I was actually afraid to do this because I didn’t have faith that all these strange,...  _ angry _ cops would follow my lead, or that all these strange  _ terrified _ cops would follow my lead, but… I think to myself, I’m on camera, even if I fail, the world will see me failing to try something good instead of not trying to do good at all… so I turn to all the cops behind me and as loud as I can I tell them, hey, let’s all show these protesters that they have a right to be angry and that we’re on their side. And so… I get down on one knee and... though I couldn’t see all of them… I could still see a  _ lot _ of them kneeling with me. And… I look up at the protesters and… they really seemed to appreciate that. And some of them are even coming up to the line of cops and start shaking hands with them. And for a second I’m thinking, wow… I may have actually just successfully proven that there really aren’t any bad guys in all this… that it really  _ is _ just a misunderstanding that can be sorted out… and for a second I let myself be proud of myself…”

“Attagirl,” he said, gently shaking her. He could see her eyes starting to glaze over. “She won’t even let  _ herself _ tell herself that she can’t change the world.”

“Yeah, well… don’t speak too soon. Because the reporters all want to pull me aside and interview me… because of course they did, I’m the hero cop from a few years ago… and I’m repeating everything I said about how the police in this city abhor police brutality and demand justice for the man that was killed, and... and I’m feeling good about things for a little bit… but then I hear the noises… becoming… uh… before it was just people chanting, but now, it’s becoming… I can just hear it getting  _ violent _ .”

“Let it out… let it out… you’ll feel better for it.” He put his other arm around her and got ready for what was about to come.

“So I excuse myself from the reporters and I turn the corner and look back at the front of the library, and… it’s just a free-for-all… and if they sent us to war, that was a battlefield, alright…”

Her voice didn’t break, but the first tear did make its way out of her eyes. And seeing that almost made a tear come to his.

“And it wasn’t just the cops I’d never met who were… who were acting like… like  _ monsters _ …” she continued, “it was cops too who I’ve known for  _ years _ … people I thought I could trust… and people I thought I could inspire to be better than that…”

“You did your best, I know you did.”

“But I didn’t even give up there! I… I panicked for a second, but then I… it’s so terrible to say it like this, but I saw something horrible happen, and  _ that _ was what inspired me.”

“What did you--?”

“A cop I’ve never seen before and hope I’ll never see again… a protester gets right up in his face and starts screaming at him, and he just goes and shoves him down, and then he takes his baton and swings it right down on this poor man’s knee.”

He was nodding silently and solemnly again. None of this surprised him.

“So I run over and… I do the only thing I could do… I take my own baton and I crack this guy in the shin.”

“That’s my girl.”

“And I just couldn’t believe it when he retaliated by kicking me away.”

Now  _ that _ surprised him. “No--”

“And I see another cop I don’t know, and he just indiscriminately maces this…  _ random _ guy who just happens to walk in front of him… and he doesn’t even look like he has an ounce of regret on his face about it.”

He nodded again. His phalanx had had a few like that, too.

“So I just took off running toward him, and… I’m sorry you’ll have to hear this, but I aimed right between his legs.”

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying not to project that pain onto himself.

“But I guess he saw me coming in his periphery because he just swatted me down when I came running in.”

“The nerve of some people…”

“A-and there were, like… a dozen more instances like that, where I saw a cop just…  _ bullying _ a random peaceful protester… where I tried to intervene… and I actually managed to stop a few, but most of them… I’m only one person, you know? I’m not Wonder Woman…”

“You are to me.” He knew that there was a fair chance that that line would come across as wildly inappropriate, but she needed her spirits lifted somehow and he believed it was worth the risk.

Sure enough, however, she just shoved at his side in annoyance. “But you know what part hurt  _ me _ the most? Uh--  _ directly _ , I mean, because you know, it hurts me to see people beating up on other people, it hurts me to watch…  _ blatant _ injustice happening in real time--”

“I know, I know. You’re an empath,” he assured her. “One of the many things I like about you.”

“Yeah, well, maybe empathetic to a fault. But the one thing that hurt  _ me _ and nobody else the most… it wasn’t getting knocked to the ground again and again. It was when… I saw a protester with a megaphone. And I had the idea that if I went up to them and just asked them nicely to borrow it then maybe she would let me use it to get the cops back in order. So I ran up to her. And I tried to look awkward on purpose so she knew I wasn’t a threat -- kind of the opposite of what I saw some of the other officers doing. And I’m about to ask her if I can borrow her megaphone and she just… leans over me… and starts blaring in my ears, ‘ _ Silent cops are guilty, too! Silent cops are guilty, too! _ ’ And I’m trying to tell her, hey, I’m  _ trying _ to ask you to help me to not be silent about everything that’s happening, but… then it just… something just  _ goes off _ in my head, and I think… I have the thought… ‘wow… these people really do think that… I’m… not… a good person.’”

And if this were any other day he might have said,  _ Who cares what they think? You know yourself better than they do and you’re a good person to the people you care about. _ But after today, he had a more complex opinion about that.

“A-a-and… is it… that they think I’m not doing enough to be a good cop, or… do they really not think that there  _ is _ such a good thing as a good cop anymore? B-because I’m not completely sheltered, I know that people’ve been saying there’s no such thing as a good cop since forever, but when I think of people saying that, I always thought of the delinquent kids from my hometown who hated the cops because of course they did, but now… it’s only been in the last few years I’ve started to hear the idea that there’s no good cops from people who… from people who seem much more respectable than the kids who smoked cigarettes behind the school. So these protesters… did they think I was failing at my duty, or did they think my duty was evil?”

“It’s a mix, probably.” He was waiting for his turn to talk to elaborate.

“And this is what makes it all the more confusing: I… I saw people on both sides misbehaving. I saw good and bad on both sides of the line. I saw protesters minding their own business and protesters throwing Coke bottles at us and spraypainting police cruisers. I saw cops minding their own business and cops assaulting civilians. And before the news came, when everything was at a… not a  _ stalemate _ , but something like that--”

“‘Stand-off’?”

“Sure, that works. Before I led the cops in kneeling and went aside to do the interview, it was only a few instances of rowdiness, and it was all from the protesters spitting on us or giving us the middle finger… but even then, there were only a  _ few _ people doing that. And I remember thinking that they told us -- the chief and the dispatchers, I mean -- that there were going to be a lot of angry protesters there who were going to want to take their anger out on us, and I remembered that as I saw these rogues try to take cheap shots on us, and I thought… okay, I think I get it, this is going to be one of those where a few bad protesters makes the whole group look bad, and I was just hoping that wouldn’t be enough to escalate into a major riot. But then… but then I stepped away to do the interview… and I heard it get worse and I got back there… and… I don’t know  _ who _ started what… I-- I’m sorry, I need something to drink, I’m losing my voice again…” She grabbed her mug of tea and took a long sip.

“Not a problem,” he said. He was making a point to try to glean all the information he could from her so that he knew how to talk around his side of the story.

She put the mug down. “And I don’t want to take anybody’s side without knowing for sure who it was. I don’t want to be the cop who sells out her brothers and sisters, but I also don’t want to be the cop who just assumes that it must have been the protesters who started it when I know for a fact that I was standing alongside some guys and gals who weren’t very nice. So all day since I’ve been telling myself that it must’ve… it must have been a fifty/fifty split. It must have been one of those things where-- you know what? Remember how I said I thought this whole thing didn’t have to have good guys and bad guys? Well I told myself that maybe the escalation was another misunderstanding. Maybe somebody made a move that someone on the other side thought was going to be an attack, but it wasn’t, but they  _ thought _ it was, so they made an offensive move that they  _ thought _ was defensive, so the other side fought back, and… something like that…”

“That’s very judicious of you.” He was almost concerned that he had spent so long being playfully sarcastic that his moments of genuinity came across as second-tier sarcasm.

“And that’s what I thought before I got back to the station, and as I was… as I was waiting for the chief to have his talk with me… I shouldn’t have done it, but I got on my phone and started scrolling… I-I don’t know why I thought that was a good idea, I don’t know what I thought I would find there, it’s almost like a reflex to check my phone when I’m bored now--”

“Hey, don’t worry about that part, the whole planet’s addicted to those things these days.”

“And… I saw a lot of people… sharing photos and videos… from all across the country. And… I have to say… in a lot of them… the police looked like the bad guys. The police looked like the ones escalating things. A-and, you know, I’m Facebook friends with a lot of other cops, and I saw some of them share videos from downtown and around the country of protesters rocking the boat, but… yeah, even including them, it still really looked like there were a  _ lot _ more cases of bad cops than bad protesters. A-a-and, I mean, you know, maybe I’m just not getting a good sample size on social media, because I haven’t been to all these places and seen these protests and riots firsthand, so I don’t know the full story of any of them, but…”

He was finding himself having trouble paying attention to her, not because he was bored or disinterested or anything, but because seemingly every word she said checked off a box for something he wanted to bring up, and he kept mentally reformulating how he was going to say what he needed to say in light of what she had already mentioned. Well, at least this way he wouldn’t have to break as many harsh truths about his perspective as he otherwise would have.

“...and I think back to the scene I saw,” she continued, still staring straight ahead of her at a blank spot on the wall and hardly moving a muscle. “And I think of what I saw on the… gosh-darned internet, with so many people saying that it was the cops who turned all these protests into riots, saying that cops weren’t afraid of redneck gun nuts protesting the economy shutting down but they’re afraid of unarmed people fighting for their rights, saying in complete seriousness that the police aren’t the good guys…  _ ever _ … and obviously I already knew there were bad cops, I’m not an idiot, but when things turned south, and I saw -- and this wasn’t all of them, I’d never say it was, these are still my sisters and brothers of the badge -- I saw… some cops beating up random people, others clearly fearing for their own safety, some standing around and not doing anything… and then there were a few like me who were trying their best to make things right, but… they weren’t making much progress… and looking back on it, I keep thinking of it like this: I saw a bunch of bullies, and I saw a bunch of… cowards who were too afraid to stop the bullies, and I saw a bunch of cowards whose idea of overcoming their fear and being brave meant  _ being _ a bully. And the people like me who were trying to take a stand and be the heroes and leaders and…  _ good people _ who the situation needed… we just had no power… we were outnumbered…”

He took his eyes off her for just a second to take a glance at the room and remind himself that they were still just sitting on the couch and weren’t alone in a vacuum with their tormented thoughts, and just as he did that, he felt her shudder. He looked at her again. The tears had come.

“...and what hurts me the most is knowing that I already  _ did _ it  _ once _ !” she wept. And he hugged her. “I already proved myself capable of bringing about positive change where people said it couldn’t be done! There was corruption! And there was bigotry! And the police weren’t protecting and serving everybody equally! And I exposed the bad people who were causing it and got them out of power and I…  _ thought _ I fixed it! I mean, now I’m not so sure! Yeah, I remember back when that all happened and I was in the news, I remember seeing people on the internet jeering, ‘ _ oh, look at her, this cop thinks she just solved racism forever! _ ’, and I told myself that they were just a bunch of trolls and losers who would never actually put in the legwork to make the world a better place themselves, but… while I would  _ never _ say that I ‘ _ solved _ ’ racism  _ forever _ , I… yeah, I’d’ve liked to imagine that I at least took a big chunk out of it! Moved us a lot farther in the right direction than where we were! Does that make me stupid? Does that make me naïve?”

“No… no, it doesn’t,” he whispered, eyes closed, focusing on her energy.

Her mood was showing signs of stabilizing again. “Because I know that the chief didn’t commend my leadership for nothing. So I went and tried to be the leader I knew I could be, and… was it a fluke the first time? Was it dumb luck? Am I a bad leader? Or were all the other cops just… stubborn little sons-of-guns who would never follow anybody’s lead? Or… or did the math of that situation just mean that my morality and leadership… didn’t matter?”

He opened his eyes again as he kept hugging her and let his eyes wander toward the doorway to the kitchen. He had an answer for her question but he was going to keep it to himself, at least for now.

“Because I… I don’t ever plan to lose my optimism, but okay, I’ll admit, I’ve gotten a  _ little _ jaded over the years. I used to think bad cops were a rarity -- okay, not as rare as I thought. And I thought  _ most _ cops wanted to be good guys who fought the bad guys -- now I really think that most cops don’t have any interest in being a good cop or a bad cop, they just want a government job with good benefits that gives them some modicum of power and doesn’t involve running into burning buildings, but… you know what they say about people who never choose to be good people. And after what I saw out there… for the first time, I’m wondering… what if I didn’t get into the right line of work? What if all those people on the internet are right when they say that the police department is no place for good people, and that all the good people in the police should see what’s going on across the country and get out now?”

He released the hug, grabbed her by the shoulders, and looked her in the eyes. “Well,  _ I _ still think you’re one of the best people I’ve ever met. And I don’t ever want you to forget that.”

It was hard for her to maintain eye contact. “And I know you do, and I appreciate that, and I love you for that, but… jeez, what’s the point of thinking you’re a good person and the people you love thinking you’re a good person if  _ everyone _ else in the world thinks you’re not one? The entire world can’t be wrong…”

“Honey, look at me. It’s  _ not _ the entire world, and even if it was, who gives a sh-- who cares!? They don’t know the real you!” Screw it, after deciding not to say that earlier, he said it anyway. She clearly needed to hear it.

“Oh, they know me, alright… I’m a local celebrity, remember?”

And anticipating an answer like that was one of the reasons he thought he’d have been better off biting his tongue. But hey, he tried. “May I ask a question?” he begged in earnest.

“Shoot,” she said dejectedly.

“You mentioned that you tried to break up police brutality wherever you saw it… I don’t know about you, but I was out there by City Hall for hours. So did you just… try to break up beatings for that whole time, or did they send you somewhere else, or…?”

Now she was the one nodding stoically while staring into space. “Good question… fair enough. At a certain point… man, I just feel so cowardly for this… I stopped trying to break it up and just started tending to the fallen protesters. Calling in medics over the radio, lying and saying there were fallen cops so the paramedics would get there faster… I mean, there  _ were _ a few cops who needed medics, a couple protesters body-slammed them pretty good, but it was a fraction as many as there were protesters on the ground… of course, when the tear gas came, I had to get out of there and protect myself, because I would’ve been no good to anybody blind...”

“And when I was sitting outside the chief’s office waiting to talk to him, what were you discussing with him in there?”

“Oh! I completely forgot to mention. For all my efforts to be a good cop and stop the bad cops… the chief called me in and told me never to assault my fellow officers ever again. Even if they deserved it; he said that it’s disruptive at best and at worst, it can expose a crack in our armor to the ‘bad guys’ -- his words, not mine.”

“I believe you.”

“Yeah…” she sighed. She grabbed her mug and took another swig of tea, which was pretty tepid by now. “Well… unless I remember something else, I… I think that’s all I needed to say. So yeah, that was my day… easily the worst ro-test-- uh--  _ riot _ , or…  _ protest _ … sorry, got my wires crossed… worst of either of those I’ve ever seen, is what I’m trying to say... Thanks for listening to all that.”

“Well, it was certainly a riveting story. I’m glad I could be here for you.”

“And I’m glad to have you here for it,” she said as she received another hug; she’d never get tired of receiving them. “So… how was your day?”

“Well, uh… honestly, a lot of the same as yours,” he said as he sat back on the sofa to make himself comfy for what was going to be a tough moment coming soon. “A lot of people I thought I knew misbehaving, a lot of moral confusion…” Should he just rip the Band-Aid off and get it over with?

“Well, when I got out of the chief’s office, you rushed in there and told me not to wait up for you, said you were gonna find your own way home. What did you and him talk about?”

...Well, she asked. “Oh, I quit.”

“ _ YOU WHAT!? _ ”

“Yup, yuh-huh.”

She stood up on the couch and gave his shoulders a couple of good angry shoves as she leaned over him and said, “ _ Really!? _ After a day that proves now more than ever that we need more good people on the force, you just  _ fffffff-- fricking _ quit!? You  _ really _ think that’s gonna be helpful!?”

He stared at her, trying to look bashfully confused so she wouldn’t know how disappointed he was that she had so vehemently and immediately rejected the merits of his decision. He smacked his palms onto his knees as he said, “Welp, I guess that’s all I needed to say about  _ my _ day. That was fast, huh?” he half-heartedly quipped as he leaned forward and stood up off the couch.

“Where are you going!?”

“I’m famished. What’s for grub tonight?” he mused as he waltzed into the kitchen.

And as he disappeared into another room, she had a moment to put this moment into perspective. Her first thought was a frightening one: was this going to be that irreconcilable schism that would wind up being the end of them, the one she’d had bizarre lusophone nightmares about? But then her second thought shortly afterwards was more hopeful: well, how did she  _ know _ this schism was irreconcilable? After all, this was the guy who was once convinced that he and many others simply weren’t born to be good people, and although that once seemed like an ideological difference that would never allow them to see eye-to-eye, a little bit of getting to know one another had resulted in a mutual understanding and him (mostly) coming around to her way of thinking -- or at least she thought it had, God knows what he thought of himself now that had caused him to do what he had apparently done today. But she wasn’t going to find out what on earth he’d been thinking unless he got it out of him, and he probably didn’t want this to be an irreconcilable schism either. So she got off the couch and went to find him in the kitchen; this didn’t have to end like that strange dream if they could be smart about it.

He was staring disinterestedly into the open refrigerator when she walked in. “Uh… spaghetti? That’s easy to make, right? You want spaghetti?”

She stood in the doorway and tried to think about how she could say what she wanted to say in a way he’d want to hear. “Uh… after today, I’m… I’m not really in any rush to make dinner.”

“Snacktime it is then,” he said, not looking at her as he opened the freezer and extracted a box of blueberry waffles.

“Hey, uh… I’m sorry I snapped like that, that wasn’t fair to you--”

“No, it’s fine. I get it. Rough day. These things happen.” He still didn’t look at her as he put the waffles in the toaster.

“But you know, that’s kind of the thing…” She realized this was probably going to be another long talk so she went over to the kitchen table and took a seat facing him at the counter. “I… that riot today definitely couldn’t have helped, but I really kind of think that whether or not I had a bad day at work, I wouldn’t have ever in a million years taken it well to hear that you… quit.”

“Hm. And why is that?” He leaned back and put his elbows behind him on the counter. If she wanted to trap herself, he would let her.

“Well…” She looked into her folded hands as she spoke. “...If I had to rank my proudest moments in life, then… 1-A would be saving the city in my first month on the force, and 1-B would be… inspiring you to be the best person you could be, to help you show that there was a good person -- a  _ great _ person -- a great person inside of you who you hadn’t let the world see before. Those two things really are 1-A and 1-B, and they both rank higher than getting accepted to the force itself in the first place even after everyone in the world told me I couldn’t. But the idea that you really had become a better person… yeah, I’ll be honest, that hinged on your choice to join the force, too. So…” And she looked up at him and looked him in the eye as she said, “hearing you say so matter-of-factly that you quit, it just… made me wonder if all that progress had been undone.”

He gave another one of those stoic nods, and told himself to be careful with his words so as not to devastate her too much. “I see, I see… and today’s events haven’t changed that little stipulation for you?”

“Wh-what do you mean?”

“Well, you said it yourself: between what you saw firsthand and what you saw of the public’s opinion, this was the first time that you for-realsies considered the thought that maybe policing, in general, on a conceptual level, was not actually a noble profession.”

“Gh-- y-yeah, it crossed my  _ mind _ , and I wrestled with it all day, and I still am, but I… I never arrived at the conclusion that it  _ wasn’t! _ ”

He shrugged. “Well, I can’t read your mind.”

“Why?” she asked, although there were several things she was asking  _ why _ about. “You… you said you had a very similar day to me, and I believe it… was today the day that  _ you _ decided that you couldn’t… be a good person and work alongside these people?” She looked visibly afraid that she knew the answer already.

He allowed himself to smirk just a little bit, but not too much lest it look like he was enjoying putting her through this crucible. She was finally getting his point of view. “The short answer is  _ yes _ ; the long answer is that this is far from the first time in my life that I’ve felt that way. Now… I didn’t have the toughest life, but for the first decade or so of my existence, my family lived in a pretty undesirable inner-city neighborhood. Then they got lucky with their jobs and got promotions and got us a house in the comfy suburbs, but then I left home at seventeen and bounced around the country trying to get my footing as a businessman, and wouldn’t you know it, that situation put me in close contact with a lot of people on the fringes of society, in cities all across this country. The kind of people who crooked cops like to prey on. And if you were to tell these people,  _ hey, don’t worry, there’re still good cops out there _ , they would tell you…  _ then where are they? Where were they when I needed them? And if they’re so good, why aren’t they doing something about the bad ones? _ And I’m not saying it’s an airtight argument, but it’s definitely one that’s hard to argue wi--”

_ Pop! _

“Ooh, toasty!” He grabbed a waffle out of the toaster and took a hearty chomp out of it.

“But-- yeah, so there’s failures in the police department! In cities all around the country! But that doesn’t  _ preclude _ the existence of good cops trying to get to the bottom of it! And not having any support from our community just makes it harder for good-intentioned cops to find encouragement to bother trying!”

He swallowed his food. “Oh, I totally get your point of view -- you had me convinced there for a few years, remember? But I’m just saying that the idea that the institution of the police is an organized gang of bullies and sociopaths isn’t a new idea, and it’s not something that was exclusive to… y’know, anarchists who believe cops are just hired security protecting the interests of the rich or delinquent teenagers who don’t like that the lawman at school won’t let them get high in the boys’ room in peace. Not everybody in America is like the God-fearing Christians back in your little small town who think of a police officer and conjure images of a Norman Rockwell painting of a jolly overweight constable patronizing a little girl’s lemonade stand. A lot of people in this country’ve lived their entire lives without feeling protection from the police even once… and I know a lot of ‘em… I was born among them and wound right back alongside them again a few years after that.” With that, he took another bite as he used his other hand to fish in his pocket for his phone.

“I… think I see what you're saying?” She just felt the need to say something, but couldn’t think of anything more constructive than that; this all was still hitting her like a ton of bricks.

“This stupid thing,” he could be understood to say with a stuffed mouth as he held out his cellphone. He swallowed; “I lost a lot of friends when I decided to join the force, and I probably would’ve lost more if I ever bothered updating my work details on Facebook, which I didn’t do specifically to avoid alienating more people; as my father always told me, it’s important to maintain connections with people, even people you don’t like,  _ especially _ people you don’t like, and even people who don’t know that they wouldn’t like the real  _ you _ , because you never know when you’re going to need a favor from them.” He looked down at his phone and moved his thumb around the screen to unlock it. “And I got that favor today… in the form of a wake-up call from people I’m afraid I may have lost touch with.”  _ Omph, chew. _

“What’re you looking at?”

_ Gulp. _ “An overwhelming mountain of evidence that suggests that if you -- or I, or anybody -- if we actually talked to the common people we sought to protect and serve when we took this job… a  _ lot _ of them would tell us that our good intentions would be best served somewhere else. Let’s look at some of these: ‘I don’t see any good cops in this video’; ‘They’re fighting a protest against police brutality with more police brutality’ -- that one’s in all-caps; ‘Rich people are afraid of gangs of violent thugs; poor people know the most violent gang of thugs is the police’; ‘This city can’t equip its hospitals for a pandemic but it can afford to turn its police into a military’ -- she’s from New York; ‘If a good cops stands by and allows these things to happen, then they’re not a good cop’; ‘Fuck the police’--”

“Hey, you don’t need to say the swear words.”

He glanced up from his phone, looking very unamused by that comment. “...I’ll continue: ‘Fuck the cops’; ‘Fuck the pigs’; ‘Fuck 12’; a YouTube link to a punk song called ‘Fuck Authority’; ‘When I say “Fuck the police” and you say “Hey, my dad’s a cop,” that includes your dad’; ‘Cops are class traitors’ -- I forget if that guy’s a communist or an anarchist, but I know he really doesn’t like neoliberal capitalism; ‘Why are they so afraid of peaceful protesters from marginalized groups but not privileged idiots who bring automatic weapons to government buildings?’; ‘All Cops Are Bad’; ‘All Cops Are Bastards’; ‘ACAB’; ‘ACAB’; ‘A-F-C-A-F-B’; a really lengthy post about a cop from New York who tried to expose corruption in the NYPD and for his efforts they broke into his house, threw him in a psych ward, and had him branded as legally delusional -- moral of the story being that good people get bullied out of the force; ‘Who are they protecting? Who are they serving?’; ‘All the cops back in my hometown were the high school bullies who just wanted power, and now they have it’; here’s somebody who’s actually had the balls to write ‘Blue Lives Matter’ and he is getting  _ eviscerated _ in the comments; ‘I have never felt the protection of the police’; ‘The police only exist to uphold the status quo for the benefit of the rich’; a post from a guy who got blindsided by a squad car when they blew a red light and then they made him sign a thing saying  _ he _ was the one who blew the light and he can’t get a lawyer to take his case because they all know they can’t beat the police in court -- apparently this happened a year and a half ago and he’s been afraid to say something about it publicly, and this was in… Chicago, I think?; ‘Defund the police’; ‘Abolish the police’; ‘Abolish the police’; ‘Defund the police’; here’s a story I keep seeing out of Buffalo about a cop who stopped another cop from beating the living daylights out of someone and wound up getting suspended from the police union and had her benefits revoked as a result; ‘Only a cop could get away with retaliating with war crimes after getting hit in the head with a water bottle while wearing a riot helmet’; ‘I hate The Police, “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” is a creepy song about a pedophile, and also cops are dangerous criminals who should be on antipsychotics’ -- looks like that guy got some heat for making a joke out of the situation, but it certainly got people’s attention; ‘The only ones who should be mass incarcerated are the ones doing the mass incarcerating’; ‘The only ones they serve and protect are their own, even when the whole world sees them committing acts of premeditated evil’; ‘Emancipation Proclamation only abolished non-penal slavery; cops are poor people hired by rich people to catch different-looking poor people and put them in proson to make them modern legal slaves’; oh, here’s an interesting one -- ‘I’ve personally dealt with a big-city police department that was quite literally a private army to serve the interests the rich, and I’ve always held out hope that despite their corruption, other police departments in this country weren’t quite so far gone; perhaps these other cities’ police are not quite so literally oppressing the poor expressly to serve the rich, but it’s troublingly close enough, and what I am witnessing now does not prompt a political question, but a moral question,’ ...ooh, I’m gonna Like that one -- yeah, that’s from some British guy I know through my little brother, this guy’s big thing is class struggle, he actually caught some flak awhile back when he was accused of trying to turn a race issue back home into a class issue and assert leadership where someone fresh out of Europe really didn’t belong as a leader -- actually, yeah, here, somebody commented mentioning that even wealthy people of certain backgrounds can be victimized by the police because of how they look, and it looks like he responded by saying he never meant to insinuate otherwise, which is weird to see if you know him, he’s not usually the kind who needs to do damage control…”

At this point, he held his phone so she could see the screen, and he kept scrolling. “On and on and on. More of this. Yeah, there are some dissenting opinions in there, but almost everybody on my friends list is condemning the actions of the cops which led to these protests, and almost as many are condemning the way cops across the country are responding to these protests. And a lot of them are saying plain and simple, they feel like they’re being forced to draw the conclusion that police -- as a whole -- are not good people… And this is just Facebook. Do you want to see Twitter? Instagram? Hell, LinkedIn?”

“N-no, I… I already saw a bunch of posts like that, remember?” She was clearly shaken all over again by the sheer quantity of opinions against her favor.

“And I know you did,” he said as he retracted his phone, “but I need you to understand that I saw a lot of these posts, too. While you were in the chief’s office and I was sitting outside waiting my turn to tell him that I didn’t sign up for this, I was reading these, and I… I just couldn’t feel like I could ignore them…” He turned to face empty space and took a deep breath before looking back at his phone. “There was one in particular… lemme type her name in and see if I can find it again…” He shoved the rest of the waffle in his mouth and chewed in a way that just seemed vexed.

“I-it’s fine, I get your point, you saw a lot of people saying that cops aren’t good people and you believed th--”

_ Gulp. _ “Hey, toots, I’m not trying to bombard you with information for the sake of it, I’m just trying to make sure my side of the story is crystal clear to you because I have a vested interest in not having the person I love and live with think I’m stupid  _ and also _ an asshole… Alright, here it is… Just, whenever it loads… Any time now…”

He waited for a second, grabbing the other blueberry waffle and taking a bite, before walking to the other side of the kitchen where the network reception was inexplicably more reliable.

“Ah! There it is!” he remarked when the page finally rendered. “So after reading a -- what’s the word,  _ deluge _ ? -- after reading a whole bunch of posts telling me that your average day-to-day city-dwelling citizen does not think policing is a virtuous vocation, I was having a moral conflict just like you were. But then I read  _ this _ one…” He held up his screen for her to see it, but from her distance all she could see was a lengthy block of text she couldn’t make out. “... _ this _ is the one that made up my mind for me. This is from someone I went to high school with, and although I don’t agree with all of her politics, she at least phrases her beliefs in such a way that it doesn’t come across like she thinks people who disagree with her are the enemy. So here’s how she put it…”

He cleared his throat despite it being unobstructed, and she fidgeted nervously, worried that whatever had changed his mind might work on her, too.

“‘All cops are bad.’ Indent, indent… ‘Now that I have your attention, I can clarify that I know that the above statement is hyperbolic and arguably even drama-baiting, but after seeing and watching what I’ve seen in-person and online today, I found myself thinking, at least for a little while, that the idea that all cops were bad people wasn’t necessarily an inaccurate notion.’ Indent, indent, ‘Take all the cops who have done heinous things to innocent people and take them out of the equation. They’re obviously bad people and we’re not talking about them right now. We’re talking about all the cops who bear witness to these heinous actions but do nothing to stop it. I don’t know what would be worse, if they  _ can’t _ do anything to stop it, or if they simply  _ won’t _ , but one way or another, their tacit complicity in police corruption and brutality means they are simply derelict of duty; I know that nobody chooses to be a moral coward, many of us have tried to do something tough but couldn’t bring ourselves to do it and wound up kicking ourselves for our failure, but when your job description literally stipulates that you are to protect and serve your public and you are tasked with preventing your deranged coworker from ending somebody’s life in a flame of hatred, there simply is no room for moral cowardice.’ Indent, indent. ‘And I want to draw special attention to the cops who are trying and failing to stop this corruption and brutality, the cops who are consciously trying to be good cops; it’s a big country with a lot of people in it, and I know there have to be at least  _ some _ cops like that. If any of those so-called,’ quote, ‘“good cops” are reading this, I want to say that I acknowledge your efforts, but now I must ask you to acknowledge how little your efforts have helped. Maybe you’ve stopped one corrupt cop from killing a civilian who didn’t look like him, maybe you’ve exposed one officer as a serial sexual abuser, maybe you’ve delivered an anonymous letter listing the members of the force taking bribes from the mob. But the fact of the matter is you will  _ never _ be able to remedy all the problems that plague police departments across this country. There is a lot that one person can do in this world, but solving police corruption isn’t one of them, and you can tell yourself that you can be the one to change hearts and minds and win cops over to,’ quote, ‘“the good side,” but don’t kid yourself: from their selfish point of view, it would be stupid of them  _ not _ to abuse their power; after all, that was the only reason most of them joined. There’s a time when idealism gives way to naiveté, and to continue to think that American policing wants anything to do with your good intentions, especially after these past few days where police departments in cities across the countries are committing acts of terror upon the communities they’re supposed to protect and are defending their rights to do so, is most assuredly naiveté.’ Indent, indent. ‘And I know that there are plenty of people who go into the police force with good intentions, but for the vast majority of them, it ends in one of two ways: either they get bullied out or they become jaded and join the villains they once sought to usurp. And we’re not heroes in a children’s cartoon movie; we’re real people, and none of us are so heroic that we’re immune to bullying and peer pressure, not all the time. That’s why I say simply to any potential,’ quote, ‘“good cops” reading this: resign. Do it today. And don’t do it because I told you to, do it because I encouraged you to, you thought critically about what I had to say, and by your own accord, you agreed. If you want to actually help your communities, there are plenty of options: you can volunteer; you can become a social worker; you can become a teacher; you can become a firefighter; you’d have better luck being a morally-just politician than a morally-just cop. But while some people want to live in a utopia with no police, and others simply want to rebuild the institution from the ground up, the  _ modern iteration of policing as it is _ needs to be abolished, and by continuing to serve an institution which has absolutely no incentive to conduct itself in a morally-just way, despite your good intentions, you are complicit in an inherently corrupt system. Therefore all cops  _ are _ bad, because even the good ones are bad not because they choose to be evil but because their blind self-assurance that they’re doing good prevents them from seeing that they are actively participating in evil.’ Indent, indent... “I know it would be hard to hear that someone thinks all of your good intentions are actually detrimental, but I have good news for you: you have a chance to redeem yourself. Because there is no shame in abandoning a noble cause when confronted with new information that shows you that your cause is not as noble as you once thought it to be; it is only shameful if you do not replace it with another noble cause.’ ...The end.” He looked up from his screen and shoved his phone in his pocket as he walked over to the fridge, taking another bite of his waffle. “Man, I need something to drink after all that,” he said through a full mouth.

And she was still processing all of what she had just heard; it had been a lot to take in, and his unenthusiastic and quite frankly dejected tone of narration didn’t exactly aid in comprehension for a listener. Honestly, her first impression was that the post struck her as kind of manipulative, something written so confidently and eloquently that it could win people over by its tone rather than its argumentative merit, but then she thought a little more about it and arrived at the conclusion that she may have actually been a bit jealous that while she herself was stuck in this moral dilemma where she was struggling for words, this stranger could confidently and eloquently produce an essay assessing her views on the situation the same day that the situation occurred. Of course, this stranger clearly was not a bearer of the badge herself, and her life most likely wasn’t trembling and threatening to crumble all around her. But nevertheless, jealousy aside, she still had some genuine disagreements with this stranger’s points.

“Well, uh… that-- that post was certainly, uh… well-written,” she stuttered.

“Yeah, she’s a good writer,” he said with his head in the fridge. “She was an English major if I remember right, I think she got a full ride to… Iowa or Wisconsin, I forget.” He eventually settled on just grabbing a bottle of water; the thought crossed his mind that the same former classmate who had written the lengthy post encouraging him to quit the police would probably similarly encourage him to stop consuming plastic, but whereas he could rebut that the environmental consciousness of the average consumer was a moot point until enormous corporations stopped doing the majority of the damage to the ecosystem, when it came her position that it was a foolish endeavor to try to be a good person as an officer of the law in modern America, he still had no idea what to say to that even two hours after first reading it.

“But if I were to talk to her about it…” she said, “I, uh… I’d still have some questions for her.”

“And that’s totally fair. Let’s talk about it,” he said as he stared at the bottle of water on the counter. Realizing he couldn’t open it with the remainder of the waffle in his hand, he just stuffed the rest of the waffle in his mouth; it was ice cold by now and had to be eaten anyway. “Whatcha thinkin’?”

“So… she really thinks  _ every _ cop who tries to be a good person should just… give up and resign?”

“Mmhmm.” He was still chewing as he unscrewed the cap on the bottle.

“Well…” She dug her fist into her cheek as she chose her words carefully. “...I’ll be honest, I don’t like the idea that a civilian could find themselves interacting with a cop -- a traffic stop or whatever -- and that person would know that there was a one hundred percent chance that they were dealing with a  _ bad _ cop because all the good ones quit.”

He screwed the cap back on as he finished taking a swig. “Hm, fair point! Yeah, I guess if I were a civilian -- which, hey, I guess I  _ am _ again! -- I wouldn’t like knowing that if I had a tail-light out and Officer Johnson pulled me over, that it’s an absolute certainty that they had the opportunity to get out of a corrupt system and didn’t… but that’s the thing!” he said with an explanatory finger. “I have now been convinced that a good cop  _ would _ take the opportunity to get out of a corrupt system when they realize it’s unsalvageable. And I can imagine if she were here, she’d say something to the effect of the reward of someone with a good heart being present in a department isn’t worth the risk of that person becoming jaded and complacent to all the abuses of power going on around them.” He took another sip. “Believe me, there were a lot of other posts calling for officers to resign that were written a  _ lot _ less politely than hers. But hers won me over specifically because she wrote it like she was actually trying to give me advice about how to be a good person instead of just lording over me with how good of a person  _ she _ was.”

Her heart was starting to pick up speed as she asked her next question: “So… let’s be completely clear here: you agree completely with what she had to say?”

“More or less, yes,” he said with a confident smile.

“Well… uh, I… disagree.”

And to that, he shrugged coyly, still beaming. “And I had a funny feeling you would. And as I was walking home, I was just thinking to myself, ‘Jesus Christ, how am I gonna tell her?’, and then my mind went in  _ really _ weird places and I started thinking about the nature of disagreement itself, and I thought, hey, what if the reason why people don’t like it when people think differently than them isn’t because they’re intolerant of disagreement… but because they’re afraid the  _ other person _ will think  _ they’re _ stupid for disagreeing with  _ them? _ And the tragic part is that that’s a completely justified fear, especially these days -- hell, going back to social media, you don’t have to scroll too far to find somebody saying in complete seriousness ‘if you don’t agree with me on  _ x _ ,  _ y _ , and  _ z _ , then I don’t want to have a discussion about it, I just want you to voluntarily choose to stop breathing the air on this planet because that’s reserved for people whose lives are redeemable,’ but then again, sometimes people are cool with disagreement even when you expect they won’t be and they’ll be glad to talk about it, and I told myself, ‘hey, she loves me, I’m gonna trust her to be the second kind of person who has faith that I have a damn good reason for doing what I did,’ and then I told you and you immediately flipped the fuck out on me, in some ways violating my trust, but now we’re having this conversation about disagreements that recurses into itself, so now I don’t know where you stand anymore, but yeah, the moral of the story is that I’m not gonna think you’re a terrible person if you disagree with the choice I felt I had to make for myself, and I hope that you treat me the likewise. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.” And he wound down his lively gesticulating as he leaned back against the counter again, grabbing his bottle of water again. “Oh, and that’s another reason it took me so long to get home: i got so wrapped up in thought that I walked something like four blocks in the wrong direction. Shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque.”

And there were a lot of things she wanted to say to that, but out of all of them, this was the first one to slip out of her lips: “You’re… using a lot of curse words today.”

He was halfway through screwing the cap back on again before he figured he ought to just leave the cap off since he was clearly going through it quickly. “What can I say? It’s been a rough day and I don’t know if I have the mental energy to keep my language PG like I usually do around you.”

“And I know you’ve had a rough day, but… you’re really not  _ acting _ like it.” And that was part of what seemed so off about him to her: he was still acting (mostly) cool as a cucumber when by all accounts he should have been as outwardly distraught as she was.

“...Not acting like it?” Now he was fiddling with screwing the bottle cap back and forth; perhaps he really was more anxious than he was letting on.

“Yeah, I mean… I’ll be honest, after a day like today, I’d expect you to be going to pieces. Or at least… I dunno, at least acting like you’re bothered by something.”

He smiled an incredulous smile and after a moment of staring at her he put the water bottle down slowly and deliberately on the counter. He chuckled to himself. “Heh… I really don’t seem like anything’s bugging me, huh? Jeez, I must be getting good at this! Tell me, tell me… do I at least seem like a normal person right now? Or is my abundance of composure making me seem like… like a robot?”

“Uh… not a robot, but… like a sociopath, honestly. K-kinda.”

He chuckled to himself again and stepped away from the counter to let himself step into an impassioned monologue. “A sociopath? ...Jesus, I must be  _ too _ good at this! Nonono, sweetheart, let there be no confusion: I am  _ destroyed _ inside. Today, let’s see, today I had to: participate in an activity I think to be evil; confront the fact that my attempts at bettering myself have been misguided and I’ve been fighting for the wrong team for years; let’s see, I’ve had to watch a bunch of videos and see a lot of photos of innocent people being victimized and had to wonder if I was tangentially responsible for that; I’ve had to break the news to you that I fundamentally disagree with the morals we had previously agreed upon and I  _ still _ cannot get a read on how you feel about that; and now, for bonus points, I find out that I come across as a sociopath! Lady, let me remind you that I was a  _ salesman _ for twenty years. A huckster! And the key to my success was playing it cool. Playing it cool, all the time, forever. And just like with the whole swearing thing: remember, I grew up in a house where people swore like sailors who stubbed their toes; to succeed in business, I had to recognize that for  _ some _ stupid reason, although  _ most _ people use swear words, and although we have the study results that suggest people who use more profanity are actually  _ smarter _ , our brains are still wired to think that people who cuss a lot aren’t very intelligent, or at the very least aren’t very  _ classy _ , so I had to learn to control myself so that people would perceive me more highly. It’s an act that I’m well-versed at. I mean, hell, remember one of the first pieces of life advice I ever gave you?  _ Never let them see that they get to you. _ And that includes  _ you _ when  _ I _ don’t know if I can trust  _ you _ with how  _ I’m _ feeling or not!  _ Sociopath _ … pshaw. Hey, there’s another thing: on top of this existential crisis I’m having deep down that I’m not letting you see, I know that there’s a good chunk of people out there who would say I have no right to feel bad about the position I’m in because it was  _ my _ choice,  _ I _ did this to myself, I became someone I used to distrust because I met you and got the impression that cops actually  _ could _ be good people, but now I’m having second thoughts on top of my second thoughts and goddammit, I think I might’ve been right the first time before I met you. Because remember: while my people might not be on the receiving end of police brutality and corruption as much as some other peoples, we get it a helluva lot more than  _ your _ people do. Remember how I said I lost friends for becoming a cop? At least a few of them regarded me as a race traitor. And I’ve had to ponder for years whether they were right, but now that’s almost immaterial because there’re bigger moral and philosophical issues here than  _ just _ whether I’m selling out people who look like  _ me _ , specifically -- but, y’know, that too. I’ve been controlling my temperament because everything in life has led me to believe that putting on this air of suaveness is going to make you take me more seriously.” And after a lengthy period of almost flailing around the kitchen’s open space, he went up to the table and leaned in very close to her, much to her discomfort. “And why do I even give a shit!? Because -- controversial opinion as it may be -- you  _ are _ supposed to care what people think. At least  _ some _ of the time. When you’re trying to make a sale, what your audience thinks matters. When you’re trying to help your community become a safer place, what your community thinks matters. And when you’re trying to make sure the person you love won’t reject you for your choices…” (hoo boy, now  _ his _ eyes were getting teary) “...what the person you love… thinks… matters. I… I quit being a cop because as someone who took the job in the first place to protect and serve the public,  _ they _ are my boss, and if  _ they _ tell me on social media that they would feel better protected and served if I quit, then I’m gonna listen, because their opinion matters to me. And when I explain that to the person I love, who’s wanted to be a Good Cop ever since she was a little girl and who probably isn’t gonna take it lightly that I’m shitcanning her dream job--”

He looked down at the table for a second, breathed deeply, and looked up at her again, and as she stared into those glossy eyes, she didn’t think he looked like a sociopath anymore.

“--then it behooves me to make sure I explain myself so you don’t think I’m stupid or evil,” he choked out, “because I love you… and I’m very…  _ very _ afraid that you’re gonna take your love away from me because you don’t agree that what I thought was the right thing to do was the right thing to do…” At this point he threw himself backward off the table and threw his arms in the air as he walked aimlessly around the kitchen. “I’m fucking ruined inside! And I haven’t made that abundantly obvious because I haven’t found any incentive to do that! Call it sociopathy, call it toxic masculinity, call it a hustle, sweetheart, but I know what’s going on in my head and much like my decision to get the hell out of law enforcement, I  _ hope _ that you implicitly trust me to have a good reason for what I do… godDAMN, am I riled up now!”

And with that, he took his frustrations out on the refrigerator, upon which was a set of magnets in the shapes of the fifty states and the Canadian provinces, not even remotely to scale relative to one another. He slammed his shoulder into the face of the fridge door with a guttural grunt, jostling some of the more worn-out magnets and knocking the weakly-magnetized Minnesota-shaped one clean off the fridge and onto the ground. He rubbed his shoulder and looked down at the magnet, not even attempting to pick it up.

“So… yeah, that’s how I’m  _ really _ feeling, um… e-even if I don’t show it… Thank you again for coming to my TED Talk, Part 2: Electric Boogaloo -- wait, crap, I can’t say  _ boogaloo _ anymore because the neo-Nazis stole it…”

They stared at one another for a moment, her looking vaguely confused, him looking emotionally exhausted. She volunteered to break the silence.

“Come sit down with me, would you please?”

That seemed like a good idea; he needed to sit down for a second after that. Without saying anything and hardly looking at her, he made his way to the seat opposite her; something about his body language as he walked made him look embarrassed.

“You… definitely had a lot to get off your chest, didn’t ya?” she asked.

“Yeah, I, uh… I guess I did,” he confessed as he crossed his arms on the table and allowed himself to look up at her.

“Maybe you shouldn’t’ve been bottling it all up.”

He shrugged coyly again. “Or maybe it’s better that it came out the way it did, for maximum effect… who knows? Time’ll tell.”

It was tough looking at him so uncharacteristically shaken, so she decided to cut to the chase and perhaps get this uncomfortable moment over with faster: “You, uh… you really want me to approve of your decision, don’t you?”

He turned slightly and stared at the calendar for a second as he formulated his thoughts. “Hey, I mean… I’ll be able to live with myself if you don’t. It wouldn’t be the first time I irrevocably pissed off someone I care about because they didn’t like that I did what I felt I needed to do, just ask my parents… But yes, I would absolutely prefer to have your approval than to not have it. I can live without it, but I’d rather live  _ with _ it. Does that sound sane?”

“ _ Sane? _ Oh, uh… y-yeah, absolutely. Um… well, I, uh… I’m honored that you value my approval so much.”

“What can I say? You’ve earned that right.”

She nodded bashfully and he let his eyes sink to his hands again.

“You know what, though?” he said with a self-deprecating chuckle. “Maybe I’m weak-willed. I mean… first, when I was a little kid, I wanted to be a good guy; then I had one traumatic incident that made me give up on being a good guy, or at least not  _ society’s _ idea of a good guy; then I meet  _ you _ and yeah, I’m skeptical at first, but then I come around to the idea that there’s still a place for someone like me in a more traditional good-guy role; then… one post from someone I haven’t seen in-person in twenty years is enough to convince me that it wasn’t the idea that I should be a good guy that was wrong, but my idea of how to  _ do _ it was. Hey, I dunno, you tell me: do regular people go through that many major philosophical changes in one lifetime, and can they point to specific moments that made them change course? Is that normal?”

“Uh, I… honestly, I don’t know… heh, now you’ve got me wondering whether  _ I’m _ the weird one!”

“Hm… I remember a conversation I had once with my little brother. A couple years after I left home and the first real grown-up-to-grown-up conversation I really got to have with him -- I mean, he was still a teenager, but you know how teenagers are… basically he’s going through his own crisis of trying to figure out who he’s supposed to be, and he asks me… what  _ drives _ me, what makes me want to be who I am -- which, at that time, was an illegitimate businessman. I tell him that I thought it was my calling, but then… sucker’s got an ace up his sleeve, he remembers once when I accidentally told him about when I was a little kid, before he was even born, when those psychotic fucking kids beat the crap out of me and convinced me that I had no place being on the straight and narrow. Basically, he called me out for giving up on my younger self, and the conversation changed course before I could convince him otherwise. And I remembered that for years before I met you, but I had always just thought, well, hell, there’s nothing I could do about it. Then I  _ do _ meet you, and you convince me to try to be a good guy again… It took one incident for me to give up on my dreams, one incident for me to go back to them, and now once incident for me to think I was half-right the first time -- for the wrong reasons. Hey, maybe I don’t have as much conviction as I’d like to think…”

As he kept staring at his hands, she leaned over and put her hand on his, and when her hand entered his field of vision, he seemed to perk up a little bit.

“Hey,” she said. “Those were three pretty big incidents. That doesn’t mean you don’t have conviction; if anything, it’s just more proof that you’re not actually a sociopath.”

He glanced up at her and faked a suave look. “Well, it’s also more proof that my calm-cool-and-collected persona is a complete sham.”

“Oh, stop being so hard on yourself,” she said as she leaned back and playfully teased her hand at him. “You’re cool enough to me.”

And then another moment of silence passed, wherein he was looking at her like she was waiting for her to say something.

“I gotta say, though,” he finally spoke, “if you actually took it well the first time, I was  _ absolutely _ gonna try to convert you into quitting with me.”

“Wh- _ what!? _ ” she exclaimed in much the same intonation as she had when she heard his initial news.

“Hey, I was waiting and waiting and waiting for you to say the words ‘ _ I accept your decision _ ,’ but you never did, so I guess I might as well try to convince you further!”

Her face twisted and she gave him a literal sideways look. “No… no, that won’t be necessary.”

“Well, tell me, why do I have to explain my side while it’s presumed that you’re right by default?” Somewhere along the line, he had slid back into that sly smile of his which had been completely absent just a minute prior. “Surely you didn’t think this was just going to be a one-sided conversation, didja?”

“No, I, I…” But she had no idea how she wanted to answer that, so she posed a question of her own. “...Where are you going with this?”

“Pfft, where am I  _ going _ with this?” he scoffed playfully. “I had an epiphany today; it sucked to hear it, but it was something I needed to hear. Now I’m sharing it with you because I think you’ll also eventually be glad you heard it. Besides, isn’t that what  _ actually _ good people do? They help others get better?”

She was furious at herself for forgetting her tea in the other room. “It’s only helpful if you’re actually  _ right _ which I’m still not convinced you are.”

“Splendid! So we’ve established that you  _ haven’t _ actually accepted my decision and you’re not even remotely open to hearing out why I think you ought to consider following my lead!”

“Wh--!? No. No, I am not open to giving up my life’s work because I had one bad day. I’m sorry if you think that makes me a bad person or… tone-deaf or whatever.”

“ _ One bad day? _ Is that what we’re calling it?”

She put her palms flat on the table and looked at him sternly. “If any part of me were to ever be even slightly okay with quitting this job, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to suffer through all of a day like today. I would’ve just walked back to the station and done it.”

“Well, I’ve got news for you. There’s gonna be more bad days like that coming up.”

Now she scoffed, feigning confidence. “Prove it, wise guy. You can’t predict the future.”

He was still smiling and maintaining eye contact as he pulled his phone out of his pocket again. “Okay, I will!” he beamed as he typed something in.

Sure enough, the fact that he seemed to know exactly what he was doing wiped the confident façade off her face. After a few moments, he handed her his phone. On the screen was a website listing planned protests in the city; it seemed like it was booked through the next week.

“I will say, though, I’m impressed by your confidence in assuming that it  _ wasn’t _ tremendously likely that this was going to be an ongoing conflict,” he said. “Heck, go to Google and type in ‘protests’, then tomorrow’s date, then the name of any major city in this country. Even places like Anchorage and Fargo have things going on.”

She was still wordlessly spooked as she scrolled the page, so he pushed the envelope further.

“Plus, y’know, the way you put it as ‘ _ one bad day won’t make me quit _ ’ can really come across as you making this all about yourself.”

“What!?”

“I swear that’s like the third time you’ve just shouted ' _ what!? _ ’ Fuck, and they think people who don’t swear have a bigger vocabulary.”

“Y-yes, I keep shouting  _ what _ because I’m having a really…  _ turbulent _ day and I’m at a loss for words!”

“I like how I made the comment about vocabulary and then you use the word  _ turbulent _ when you could’ve just said  _ hard _ like you’re trying to show off the true size of your vocabulary.”

“Oh-- shush. And I  _ know _ other people are being affected by… I’ll say it, by  _ police brutality _ , being affected more than I am, a  _ lot _ more, but… yeah, I’m just saying that as someone who’s starting to wonder how many… bad people I’m in league with… it’s  _ also _ affecting me -- not as badly as it is others, but it  _ is _ in its own unique way!”

“Hey, I know that and you know that, but if someone else were to hear the sentence ‘I’m not quitting over one bad day,’ they might not know that  _ you _ know that. I’m just saying: you’re in a tricky spot and you gotta mind your P’s and Q’s.”

She facepalmed in exasperation. “Okay… fine. I’ll watch my P’s and Q’s. Let me say it more carefully: ...I’m not going to let… one bad day… destroy my faith in the system.”

“Okay, okay, now that that was better, but it doesn’t really address the thesis statement that you’re  _ supposed _ to lose faith in the system after a day like today. You didn’t say you have a good reason not to, you just said you wouldn’t.”

At this point, she was just glaring at him. “Why are you doing this to me?”

He leaned in with a smile that might have seemed sensual if presented in another context. “Because you’re a smart girl, and I respect your intelligence enough to challenge you. If I didn’t respect your intelligence, I would’ve just given up on you.”

“...Like how you just gave up on the police because you didn’t trust their intelligence.”

“Exactly! Well-- I’d say their decision-making ability more-so than their intelligence, but hey, same neighborhood.”

“I’m just confused why you expected me to tolerate your decision but now you’re not tolerating mine,” she spat, her bitterness unambiguous.

“Like I said, this all could have been avoided if you just said the words ‘I accept your decision.’ But you didn’t.”

“...”

“...And you’re still not.”

“... _ Well _ , I--”

“So if this is gonna become a debate, okie dokie, we’ll have ourselves a debate!”

She didn’t want a debate. She did, however, still want her tea, so she scooted out of her chair without looking at him, flourishing with an eye-roll that she genuinely thought he wouldn’t see.

Oh, he saw it, all right. But he knew nothing would be accomplished by pointing it out, so he tried to further engage her as she walked out of the room. “And I get it! From any one person’s perspective, we all think we’re right! Whom among us would bother holding an opinion if we didn’t think it was good enough for everyone in the whole wide world to feel the same way? But the only way that we’re ever going to beat this bias towards ourselves is if we allow other perspectives in! So whaddaya say?”

During that, she had left the kitchen, grabbed the mug, and returned to stand in the doorway looking like she was dealing with a rambunctious five-year-old. And he was still smirking.

“Weren’t you crying five minutes ago?” she asked.

“Yes, but now I’m past the point of shame.”  _ Smirk. _ “And as much as this situation deserves a somber attitude, that apparently didn’t work on you, so now I’m trying something new!”

Her tea was room-temperature and gross by this point, but now she was thinking that she’d need the caffeine to get her through whatever this was going to be. “So… you really want me to quit with you, don’t you?”

And he gave another one of those pretending-to-be-bashful shrugs. “I’ll be able to sleep at night if you don’t, but yes, I’d much prefer it if you did… hey, doesn’t that sound familiar?”

“Well, I’m still messed up upstairs over what happened today,” she said as she took her seat at the table again. “If you want to keep having this conversation… you don’t have to be a sad-sack, but you can’t be grinning ear-to-ear like you are now. Just… no more sarcasm, no more being a…  _ friggin’ _ goofball, just be genuine. Okay?”

“Alright, alright, you’ve set your boundaries and I can respect that…” he said, still smiling, but now more of a smile that welcomed conversation rather than a smile that made him seem maniacal in the most inappropriate of moments. “And hey, I’m sorry if I was being a dick, I was just… after breaking down back there about the state of the world and not knowing where my place in it’s supposed to be, I just wanted to feel good about something, so, uh… y’know, I forgot about the world for a second and just got giddy remembering how fun it is to mess with the head of my favorite person!”

She didn’t even crack a smile. “Oh, you’re not gonna charm me into giving up on my dream job.”

“I’m not trying to  _ charm _ you, I’m just trying to make you understand that I’m not your enemy, and you’re not mine. So!...” And his smile didn’t completely evaporate but he clearly did consciously tone it down much, much further. “...Please be candid with me: is it still your dream job after everything you learned today about how much evil does exist in American policing? I’ll say it again: is it your…  _ dream _ job?”

Just one look at her and you can tell she was giving this careful thought. “I would say… yes and no. And by that I mean… I’m actually kind of not  _ at _ my dream job yet. Like… let me put it this way… yes, my dreams involved being a police officer, but -- I hope it goes without saying -- not in a world where policing was like…  _ this _ ,” she said as she gestured to the world around her.

“Okay, fair enough,” he murmured.

“So maybe my dream job… uh… may-maybe I have to still work toward making that a reality. And I’m willing to do it, but it involves me staying on the force. You can’t change the culture of the police from the outside.”

“Hm. Funny you should say that, because me and a lot of other people are convinced that you can’t change the culture of the police from the  _ in _ side.” The smile on his face was completely gone by now. “I mean, there’s ample evidence, there’s an epidemic of bullies in the police and people who try to be good cops and whistleblowers are lucky to get out with their lives. You ever seen  _ Serpico _ ?”

“No?”

“You haven’t? Welp, guess we need a movie night. Man, ‘73 was a good year for cinema. But anyway--”

“But I really don’t think  _ our _ department is  _ that _ bad -- or at least I thought that before today! Yeah, I’ve seen cops doing bad things before, and I stand up to them, and I usually stop them! Then today happened, and…” And then she realized that she wasn’t exactly sure whether her experiences lined up with how she’d felt about them.

“Question: when you saw other cops doing bad things -- whatever that may mean -- did they know you were there?”

“Uh-- di-did they know I was…?”

“As opposed to you walking up on them and catching them in the act.”

She had to think about that one for a second. “I, uh… mostly walking in on them?”

He nodded to himself, lips pursed, almost looking like a lawyer of the guilty hearing out what their client wanted to confide in them before they saw the judge. “That’s what I suspected: you were the goody-two-shoes cop and other cops didn’t misbehave when  _ you _ were around. You got lucky.”

“Huh--!? What are you talking about,  _ I got lucky _ ?”

“I really believe that things would’ve played out differently if you hadn’t established yourself as a good cop right out of the gate -- no, excuse me, not only a good cop but a  _ publicly _ good cop. You were a local celebrity. After which point, all the corrupt cops knew that they couldn’t misbehave when you were around because not only would you report them if not stop them on the spot, they also couldn’t  _ retaliate _ against you because, hey, if the town-celebrity cop has something bad befall her, everyone’s gonna know about it and everyone’s gonna be on her side.” Now he looked almost worried that he was dropping too big a bombshell on her altogether at once, but he didn’t have a clue how he could have possibly delivered it any more gently (and all joking aside, this was starting to become a very long conversation and he was still famished). “And you know what? I was in the dark, too. Because for the longest time, I was paired  _ with _ the goody-two-shoes, and by the time they had to split us up, everyone and their grandma knew that you and me were like  _ this _ ,” he said as he held up two crossed fingers.

She didn’t know which way to look, so she looked everywhere at once. “I… I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m… I’m saying that I can’t just  _ assume _ you’re right. I mean, I’ve had my lived experiences in this force, and what I’ve seen doesn’t point to it being…  _ that _ bad -- at least not  _ here _ . I haven’t seen a bunch of cops taking bribes or cops dragging a guy out of a car and beating the crud out of him, so… I can’t just  _ assume _ it’s happening when I don’t even see it--”

“And that’s totally fair,” he said diplomatically. “But you’re not being asked to  _ assume _ it’s happening, you’re being asked to  _ trust _ that when a lot of people are saying it’s happening in your blind spot that you don’t just disregard what they’re saying.”

“And I get that, I can’t see everything, but I also can’t…  _ envision _ most of these people I work with doing these things -- and I mean anything from old-fashioned extortion to… just plain harboring hatred for other people because of how they look--”

“And it’s fascinating that you’re saying this as though it’s only a problem that cops are consciously and willfully bigotted because a lot of people would argue that there’s also an epidemic of well-meaning cops who don’t  _ realize _ that they have a subconscious bias.” And then that smirk started creeping its way back onto his face. “Why, I seem to remember once having a run-in with an officer who was new on the force, and -- bless her heart -- she thought she was being complimentary when she told me I was very  _ articulate _ \--”

“Oh, don’t bring that up just to hold it against me again!”

“I’m not bringing it up to hold it against you.” The smirk was gone again. “I’m bringing it up to prove a point. A well-meaning cop might not realize the damage they do completely by accident; sometimes it manifests itself in an offhand remark, sometimes it manifests itself in a cop shooting one guy but not shooting another guy in equal situations just because they thought deep down that the first guy just sort of  _ looked _ like a threat--”

“Okay! Alright, alright!” Clearly embarrassed, she was putting her hands up to signal him to stop. “You made your point…”

“I just needed to clarify, you confirmed my own prejudice that  _ cops _ were prejudiced when you told me that that day -- you confirmed my  _ fear _ , as it were. Now, in your case, luckily you came around to see the error of your ways, but there’s a lot more cops in this department than just you and there’s a lot of departments in this country besides just ours; not every cop is going to be so lucky as to have an awakening moment, and you and I can’t be there to personally teach all of them.”

“I know…”

“So when you say that  _ this _ department is pretty clean of evil -- before today, at least -- okay, so what? So what if it was? You think reform needs to be done from the inside? How are you gonna clean up the suburban departments? How are you gonna clean up the county department? The State Troopers? You can do your best to be an inspiration for cops everywhere, but at the end of the day, you can only occupy one space at any given moment, and there are a lot of crooked cops out there who have a very tangible incentive to never let the good guys change who they are and what they do.” He leaned back and folded his hands on the table and kept a neutral countenance and tried to look as dignified as possible. “Not to mention all the genuinely stupid cops who became cops because it’s the only work they could get with no college diploma and no vocational training... and that’s not referring to you, I know this was your dream.”

“I know…”

“So that’s why I’m skeptical that it can be changed from the inside on as big a scale as it’d need to be... I’m not trying to rub it in, you know, I’m just trying to make sure I’m crystal clear.”

“I know…” she grumbled as she looked at the lines between the floor tiles. She seemed angry, but at who or what wasn’t immediately clear to him.

He really wasn’t taking much enjoyment out of this, but he kept telling himself that this was a conversation that needed to happen, and they would never arrive at their resolution if the train didn’t keep moving. “Tell me what’s on your mind right now.”

She still kept her tired eyes on the linoleum tiling. “You know, this isn’t even close to the first time that people’ve tried to tell me that cops aren’t good people. I still remember my very first day when they put me on meter-maid duty, and I thought they weren’t taking me seriously, so I told myself that I was gonna show them what I was made of -- I was gonna fill double my quota in half a day! And after being berated by people all day long, them telling me that they hated me and I wasn’t even a real cop, the one that struck me the hardest was when this one lady started swearing at me in some foreign language and her little boy -- he didn’t know the gravity of what he was saying -- just looks me straight in the eye and translates for me, ‘ _ My mommy says she wishes you were dead. _ ’ I don’t know, something about hearing it from a kid with a smile on his face just…  _ messed _ with me. But… I went home, I felt bad about it, I thought I was a loser, but… goshdarnit, I pushed through it and I topped myself the next day again--”

“...Aaand you shouldn’t’ve done that.”

The shock of that was enough to make her bring herself to look at him again. “ _ What? _ ”

“This episode of  _ Sesame Street _ is brought to you by the word  _ what!? _ \--”

“What, you’re saying I shouldn’t’ve pushed through it!? You’re saying I should have given up then and there!?”

“--and by contributions made to your local PBS station from viewers, like you. Thank you!”

“Grghfgh--! What did I tell you about sarcasm right now!?”

He leaned in again with that smirk she wouldn’t have been able to resist if not for the grim circumstances of the day. “I’m sorry, honey; I gotta add some levity to this scene for my own sanity. But no, uh… where was I?”

“I shouldn’t have done--  _ what? _ ”

“You tried to think of another word for  _ what _ but then you realized there weren’t any, didn’t you?”

“Please just answer the freaking question.”

So he wiped the smile off his face and took a deep breath through his nose. “I’m not saying this to beat up on you, I’m saying this to make a point it seems you legitimately haven’t considered. And I say this in full confidence: you should not have tried to outdo yourself on parking duty.”

“...Why not?” Her tone and expression could be described as accusatory.

And he spoke slowly and eloquently to make sure he didn’t trip over his words when it was very important not to. “Because by doing so… by giving out two hundred parking tickets instead of just one hundred, plus however many as you gave out in the afternoon… you screwed over a minimum of twice as many people as you had to, just to make yourself look like a good, hard worker.”

She clearly had not been expecting that.

“And as we later found out, overperforming on meter-maid duty  _ wasn’t _ going to get you recognized as worthy by your superiors,” he continued. “That only happened when you took it upon yourself to become a freelance detective on the side. Again, I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, but if I were a complete stranger with no vested interest in whether or not your feelings were hurt… yeah, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that it was fundamentally a selfish move to pin an extra  _ hundred _ people for a victimless crime just so you could show off to your bosses in a move that wasn’t even guaranteed to work for you, and  _ didn’t _ .”

“Hey! I -- it wasn’t a victimless crime, they were taking up space that other people needed--!”

“People who may have never came and who weren’t entitled to a specific spot. Now, if you ticketed some jackass who parked in a handicapped spot, that would be different, but I trust that most of these people were just parked on the side of a regular city street, and they came back to see they had to pay an extra hundred bucks to the city because they were in a store for two minutes too long.”

“Well, hey, it’s the city’s space and they can do with it what they want--!”

“Excuse me?” he asked with his eyes burst open, and not in the sarcastic way one might expect from him. “Did you just admit that you, as a cop, serve the interests of powerful landowners instead of the common citizen?”

“W-wait, are the meters even owned by the city!? Maybe they’re owned by a private company just trying to make a buck--!”

“And now you’re saying that as a cop, you serve to protect the interests of wealthy businesses!” he exclaimed with his arms extended toward her as if to gesture to the universe, ‘ _ Do you see this? I can’t believe I’m actually seeing this. _ ’ He leaned back, looked off to the right, and shook his head while smiling in pure shock. “Jesus God, the commies and anarchists I know would have a field day picking on you… assuming they didn’t turn on each other and start arguing about statism…”

But she was all out of responses.

He looked back at her when he realized her silence. “Again… I’m not trying to make fun of you--”

“You don’t have to keep clarifying that.”

“...I feel like I have to. Do you believe me?”

“I believe you feel like you have to, yes.”

“No, do you believe that I’m not trying to make fun of you?”

“...I guess.”

He nodded softly, his eyes wandering off the table.

“What were you gonna say before I cut you off?”

He was about to ask if she really wanted to know or if she was just trying to get him to say something she wouldn’t like to hold against him, but he gave her the benefit of the doubt and assumed she wasn’t playing mind games. “That honestly, I would’ve sided with the people saying a good cop isn’t happy to dole out tickets and ruin people’s days.”

She grabbed her tea and brought it closer to herself, but didn’t drink from it. “I guess you’re right.”

He didn’t like seeing her this way. She wasn’t like she was just a few minutes ago where it seemed like she was still holding her own while he teased her; it seemed like his most recent point was one that she legitimately never considered before, and now when confronted with it, she looked devastated. But she clearly needed to hear it and he had to trust that she would be grateful for this new perspective in due time. But for now, there was one last thing he wanted to say, so he said it and he said it as delicately as he could.

“So… I’ve actually been toying with the idea of quitting the force for moral reasons for… kind of a while now.”

Despite still keeping her head facing the table, she raised an eyebrow at this and turned her eyes up toward him. She looked disgusted but curious where he was going with this.

“This was… what, a year and a half ago already? Do you… do you remember that really tall guy we pulled over right before Christmas that year?”

She didn’t say anything, and her head and her face stayed perfectly still in that semi-glare.

“Because I remember-- heh, I dunno why I remember it so well. This had to’ve been during one of the last shifts we worked together before they split us up after we went Facebook-official that Christmas. But I remember a lot of things about that guy for some reason. I remember the dude was two feet taller than me and I remember telling him, ‘hey man,  _ I’m _ considered a giant for our people, I didn’t know our people could get as big as  _ you _ ,’ and then naturally I had to ask him if he was in college to play ball -- naw, he was an English major or something; I remember being surprised his plates and driver’s license said West Virginia but the kid didn’t have any sort of a Southern accent, he coulda told me he grew up here and I wouldn’t’ve been surprised; and I remember we thought he was drunk, which was especially a no-no because he was nineteen, but, uh, no, he passed the breathalyzer a hundred percent, turns out he was just sleep-deprived from college. But what I most remember… the conversation him and I had while you were running his license. Because he told me that I was the first one of our people he’d seen in an officer’s uniform since he’d moved here for college. There were a few back home, he said, but none here, and it got him thinking that maybe it was just a thing that West Coast cops weren’t as… well, diverse. And I told him that there were a few cops like us -- like him and I -- back where I’m from out east, but still, not too many, and that started the whole conversation about why I wanted to become a cop and… well, why I was the only one in this town who looked like me. And I gave him the CliffNotes version. But then he asked me, why did I want to be a  _ cop _ , specifically?”

He paused for a moment to make sure she was still listening. She still looked emotionally uncomfortable but enthralled all the same.

He continued: “And I told him… it just seemed like the right place at the right time. Like, I hadn’t wanted to be a cop  _ specifically _ when I grew up, but it was on my shortlist, and then I met you, and then I became convinced that cops could be good people and that  _ I _ could be a cop and, y’know, by the transitive property, then  _ I _ could be a good person -- honestly, I just repeated the whole story all over again but this time through the lens of ‘ _ the timing just worked out right and I thought it’d be cool to be the first of my kind on the city’s force. _ ’ And then he mentioned that he asked because… especially in the last few years before then… it really seemed like it was an unpopular opinion to say that cops could be good people -- let alone that they  _ were _ good people. And he mentioned that he knew a lot of people -- especially his classmates at the U -- who were of the opinion that police and policing were invariably evil, and he was just thinking that if he went to any given class and mentioned offhandedly that he met a cop who actually seemed to be a good person, he was worried a lot of them would think he’d been fooled and some of them might think he was just plain stupid -- not  _ all _ of them would reject him, but enough of them, and some of the professors, too. Like, he went out of his way to clarify to me, a complete stranger, that he considered himself pretty progressive, but a lot of the people at college were just…  _ so _ far to the left that they would just write him off as an ignorant redneck from West Virginia if he disagreed with any of their more…  _ out-there _ stances; example given, he didn’t know if he could ever say that there were in fact cops out there who’re genuinely good people who do good things for their communities -- like you or me -- without the other kids in school accusing him of being ignorant of police brutality and then telling him that as long as police forces existed they’d always be a tool for the plutocrats. And yet --  _ and yet _ \-- this wasn’t the first time he’d heard a bad opinion on cops, this was just the first time he’d heard it so loudly. He mentioned that back home -- I don’t remember what part of West Virginia he was from, but I remember it wasn’t some small town in bumblefuck nowhere, so maybe a small city -- he mentioned that back home, he’d had some conversations with people, and every so often people would suggest that cops, as people, were not good people. And he’d ask why and they’d say, oh, you know, all they do is give out tickets and ruin people’s lives, standard stuff. And for the most part, he got the impression that most of the people back home who said this were the kind of people who weren’t exactly the most law-abiding; not necessarily  _ bad _ people, just, y’know… people who didn’t always drive fifty-five or come to a full stop at stop signs. So he’d been operating under the assumption that the only people who genuinely went through life assuming all cops were dicks were the kind of people who… hm, how should I put this?... the kind of people who never had any intention of following the law. Not even people who broke the law for moral reasons, just the kind of people who broke the law because they found the law annoying. But then he mentioned how odd he found it when he got to college and a lot of these people who seemed almost hyper-obsessed with being good people, in stark contrast to back home where people clearly didn’t care about being good or bad, and although he didn’t agree with these people about everything on how a good person ought to be… he still found it incredibly fascinating that so many of these self-proclaimed good people thought that cops were bad people.”

He paused again. She looked more intrigued than distressed now.

“And the guy made a point to clarify to me,” he continued, “that he wasn’t some sheltered dummy, he knew laws and morality weren’t necessarily the same -- Christ, I guess I really gave him good vibes if he felt comfy saying this to a  _ cop _ \-- but he just sort of thought, hey,  _ most _ laws make sense, don’t kill people, don’t steal from people, don’t screw over strangers for no good goddamn reason… and he just sort of assumed that people who consciously tried to be good people would… well, they wouldn’t  _ blindly _ approve of police, but they’d approve of the idea of police more than not. And that got him thinking. And at this point the kid remembered he was talking to a cop so he clarified that  _ he _ wasn’t one of those people who thought I was intrinsically a purveyor of evil, but I told him, hey, kid, it’s fine, I’m a good cop and I can tell you’re a good kid, and in his sleep-deprived stupor he wanted to bring up one last thing, and he mentioned that the most convincing argument about cops being bad people was from one he overheard on the subway of all places. A-and I mean the subway here, not in West Virginia; I’m sure they don’t have subway systems in West Virginia. But on this subway car, two guys’re talking and one says, hey, you know what, someone who parks their car behind a bush and waits and waits and waits just to jump out and screw over someone doing six over the speed limit? And this person has to screw over a certain quota of people to retain the privilege of doing it again and they’re completely okay with doing that for a  _ living _ ?  _ That _ person isn’t a good person. That’s what he overheard; that’s what he told me. That was the most compelling argument he’d ever heard that cops -- at least a fair amount of them -- aren’t good people; not because cops’re annoying but because they’re so content to play the neutral evil role… or the lawful evil role, depending on how you want to interpret it. And yeah, you could argue that that was basically what we were doing when we were aimlessly cruising the streets looking for reckless drivers, and I could’ve told him that and  _ really _ messed with his head, but no, I could tell that this poor kid was going through a moral crisis in real time, I wasn’t gonna do that to him, so instead I just mentioned that so far…” And he leaned in to signify that he was approaching his thesis statement. “...I’d been lucky --  _ we’d _ been lucky -- and we’ve never had to do things like sit behind a billboard and wait for someone to breeze by doing forty-four in a thirty-five. And as I was saying that to him… that was the first time I’d consciously, word-for-word thought that, yeah, I got to circumvent that lowlife rookie stuff because I’d attached myself to the cop who’d already proven she was too good for that lowlife rookie stuff… and maybe my mostly-positive experiences on the force weren’t…  _ typical _ .”

He kept staring at her for a few more seconds, and when he realized he didn’t know what he wanted to say next, he just stared at the table again. So she sat back up and decided to take the reins: “So then what did he say?”

“Hm?”

“What did he say next?”

“Oh, that’s when you walked back with his license. His record was clean.”

“...I see.”

“But… yeah, my point is that… you and I may have… not exactly been privy to some of the darker sides of our department because we were in a… let’s call it a  _ protected _ position. A position of being public and prominent good guys. The bad apples know that they have to stay in our blind spots, and they were doing a good job of that until today, when… they remembered that if they’re all working together, they can’t stop the two of us.” He let out an exasperated groan and ran his fingers up his face. “I wonder how that kid’s feeling about all this. Maybe he agrees with his classmates now.”

But she wasn’t thinking about that college student they’d encountered a year and a half ago; she was thinking about something her partner had said. “You said we’re in a  _ protected _ position.”

“...Yeah?”

“Elaborate.”

“Well… you know, like I said…” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair as he tried to think of the words. “...For starters, we basically saved the city in a public story that would’ve probably made a great movie… so everyone in town knows who we are, and they know that we’re good people -- or at least we  _ try _ to be… so the crooked cops on the force won’t allow themselves to be sloppy with their corruption because they know that if we see what they’re doing, we can make a public stink about it and they can’t touch us--”

“Well, there you go!” she suddenly burst into life, hands thrown in the air. “We shouldn’t be running away from the force, we should be using our positions as leverage! This is our chance to prove to the public that good cops exist and we can and will stand against this… this…!”

But before she could think of the word she wanted, he had a word for her himself: “How?”

“...Whaddaya mean,  _ how _ ?”

“How?” There was not an ounce of joy visible in his face. “How can we stop the transgressions we’ll never be able to see? How can we erase the damage done? And how on earth can we cure this disease in departments other than our own?”

She sputtered in incoherent frustration before finally spitting out: “ _ Better! _ Being  _ better! _ Today I led my-- heck, my  _ unit _ I guess you can call them, and I took a stand against police brutality and bad police making a mockery of good police!” She was leaning so far over the table it seemed like she was about to stand up on it. “It’s going to be tough, but we can fix this with strong leadership! And… I know I can do it!  _ We’ve already done it! _ ”

“You tried it today and you were subsequently reprimanded for it,” he said, still sounding as morose as a eulogist. “I’m in awe of your drive to be a one-woman city on a hill for every police department in the country to admire. I really do. But I was a kid in the streets and I was an adult in the streets, and I’ve just seen too many people who not only don’t have any good incentive to be a good person, but have a  _ very _ good incentive to be a  _ bad _ person.”

Her mouth was hanging open in disgust as she wanted to say many things and yet didn’t feel like any of them would get through to him. Then she thought of one that might work. “Y-- so you’re saying you quit because social media told you to?” she asked as she pointed a shaking finger at him with one hand while extracting her phone with her other; there seemed to be a tinge of nervous chuckling in her voice. “Well… you wanna know what kept me going on the way home from work? Ya wanna know-- you wanna know what I made myself keep thinking about to keep my sanity? I’ll show ya!” And she unlocked her phone and feverishly started clicking, scrolling, and typing, not looking up for a solid fraction of a minute.

All the while he kept looking at her, thinking that it was heart-wrenching to see her lose absolutely all of her composure but… yeah, this conversation needed to happen.

“C’mon, c’mon, where did I see it!?” she grumbled to herself, still not looking up. “It-- it was a really nice video of the Chief of Police of… Grand Rapids, I think? He led his department in joining the protesters instead of fighting them and he talked with the protesters to get to see their point of view and ask how the police could make the community bett--”

“I saw it, too,” he interrupted, almost apologetically. “And I Googled around to do some more digging. He wasn’t the Chief of Grand Rapids, he was the Sheriff of whatever county Flint’s in. And while what he did to actually stand with the protesters and get involved with the community he’s supposed to protect was a big step and I would never say otherwise… I can’t look at the facts and say that it was honestly that effective. And the facts are that he did this  _ alone _ ; his men and women weren’t with him. And even if he does use his powers to fix his department from the inside -- which still might not happen because even the best-laid plans often fall apart -- just look around you. Do you see any other departments anywhere in the country who were inspired to take up positive action because they were inspired by  _ him _ ?”

“ _ ME! _ ”

“Very well then,  _ and _ ?”

...And she had no answer for him.

“I might have even saw the same post as you. It said it was a great display of leadership. Now, what he did was a good thing, maybe even a brave thing, but he did it on a personal level, and I see no evidence to suggest that he actually  _ led _ people to follow his example. Not even to say he’s a bad leader as a person, but even under a good leader, a lot of people in this world are too stubborn to be good followers. Including a lot… a  _ lot _ … of police officers. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I think I recall you saying that you had very similar feelings earlier today.”

Well, an impassioned burst of emotion had been no match for his calm and cool demeanor. He still wasn’t smiling, and she knew just as well that he was taking no joy in combating her ideals, but that didn’t make it any easier on her that he seemed to have an answer for everything -- not even necessarily a  _ good _ answer for everything, certainly not any argument that could convert her on anything, but quite frankly, yes, after all the hard work she’d done defending her line of work -- to him, to protesters, to casual acquaintances on the internet, to complete strangers who saw her in passing once and never saw her again -- she would very much like it if just once he didn’t know what to say, if just once he could partake in the embarrassment she felt every time she drew a blank in this conversation so she wouldn’t be the only one who had to feel stupid. She cursed that she just had to fall for the smooth talker. Of course, knowing him, if probed on it, he’d probably insist that the part where he slipped into an uncharacteristically vulnerable tirade was far more embarrassing than her not having rehearsed answers for everything he threw at her. So perhaps they were even.

But rather than show her cards, she sat back in her seat and tried to match his energy. She folded her hands on the table in front of her and said as plainly as she could, “And you could have all the facts right, but honestly… I’m just not convinced that those facts tell a story that tells me beyond a shadow of a doubt that my only moral option is to quit the force.”

The slightest of smirks cracked his face. “And you know what? Maybe you’re still right about everything. But you know what? Even if I woke up tomorrow thinking, ‘ _ Aw, crap, this was a mistake, I didn’t need to quit to prove that I oppose evil _ …’ this was probably something I should have done anyway. Just like I was saying with the freakishly tall kid; he asked me why I chose to become a cop, and so I told him honestly: I had the opportunity to become the first cop of my kind and that seemed cool. It was that and the fact that you inspired me -- and you should still feel proud that you inspired me -- but that’s it. That’s  _ all _ .” And the smirk gave way to a remorseful look. “The fact of the matter is that this has always been  _ your _ dream; I just borrowed it. Yes, I told you that when I was a little kid I wanted to grow up to be someone great and heroic, then you came along and presented me with the opportunity to…  _ kinda _ do…  _ something _ like that, so I took it. But I didn’t literally want to be an adult version of a Boy Scout -- at least not for my entire life. This was a fun ride, but this was never my true calling -- not to suggest that I know what my true calling  _ is _ , but… I know it wasn’t this.” And then because it seemed like the right thing to do, he leaned in and put his hand on hers and looked her in the eyes even more deeply than before. “Hey. Listen. You taught me that I shouldn’t let society tell me that I was born to be a bad person, and I thank you for that. But I need to figure out how to be a good person in my own way; I can’t just follow your lead all the way down the line. I know that this is an enormous internal conflict you’re having and that whatever answer you arrive at won’t be easy; I know this because I fought that battle today myself. And I still will recommend that your best course of action would be to quit  _ for now _ … but make it clear that you’ll be back when they get their act together, and that you’ll know when that moment is because they won’t vindictively refuse to have you back after you had a good goddamn reason for leaving them. That way you wouldn’t have to completely abandon your dreams; you’d just be demanding your dreams put in the work to  _ earn _ the  _ right _ to be the dream of someone as awesome as you. But hey… it’s up to you…” And he sat back and folded his own hands. “And I wish you luck in figuring out what you’re gonna do, because I know it’s not an enviable position to be in. And whatever path you choose, I’ll accept it. But this is  _ your _ battle now… and I can’t fight this battle with you anymore.”

_ I can’t fight this battle with you anymore. _ She knew that there were several valid ways she could interpret that statement, but for better or worse, her mind jumped to the most distressing one. Don’t let that be like that goshdarned dream. She had put so much into her career and into this relationship and now it seemed like the universe was demanding she abandon one or the other. But she didn’t want to give the universe that kind of power over her. So she just kept staring pensively at him and put the ball in his court, fully expecting him to calmly get out of his chair, politely push it back in, and quietly go upstairs to pack a duffel bag and leave.

But he never did, and as their staring match continued, he went from looking bummed to looking visibly confused by the way that she seemed to have absolutely no reaction to anything he’d just said. “So, uh… how’re you feeling now?”

She wasn’t going to be the agitator. “I’m just thinking that… I’ve just poured too much of myself into all of this to give up on it now.” And he hoped to high heaven that he understood the double entendre.

And had he known that she was afraid this was how they break up, he probably would have caught that subtext, but as far as he knew, that wasn’t even an option on the table and they were still talking strictly about their career paths. “And that’s completely understandable. Like I said, I don’t expect you to make this decision lightly. But I would be remiss not to encourage you to explore all your options.” Then he tried his best to look as compassionate as he felt when he added, “Hey, you pushed me to better  _ my _ self… it’s about time I returned the favor.”

“And… that’s very fair of you, and I appreciate that, but… jeez, I just can’t shake the thought that I wouldn’t be being true to myself if I gave up on all that I cared about now--”

“Oh, get that Baby-Boomer bullshit out of my face!” he snapped. “I-I’m sorry for popping off like that, but… Jesus, a long time before this current socio-political kerfuffle started, I’d been noticing an epidemic of people who seemed to be operating under the assumption that it was somehow hypocritical to change their values. Like… no! No, developing your character isn’t just for children and pressing the reset button on your life isn’t just for recovering alcoholics who become Jesus freaks! And it distresses me that a lot of people think it is! And you know what? Let’s pretend it was! You’re not even thirty yet. Plenty of people in this world would say that you’re still a kid, and they would mean that in the nicest way possible, the ‘don’t-worry-if-you-still-don’t-know-who-you-are-because-you-still-have-plenty-of time’ way. And-- God, I’ve got eight years on you and sometimes  _ I _ have moments where I’m just like, ‘shit, do I  _ really _ know who I am?’ And some poor schmucks go their whole lives  _ never _ finding out who they really are because they think the person their elders raised them to be  _ is _ their true self. So… yeah. Don’t be afraid to change course. A decision like this is going to be a painful one, but hey, it might lead to personal growth. So yeah, consider it a growing pain.”

He looked kind of exhausted after that, just sort of letting his eyes wander around the room for lack of energy to direct them anywhere specific. But she couldn’t stop staring at him. ‘ _ A decision like this is going to be a painful one _ …’ …She wasn’t misinterpreting that, was she?

He eventually found the strength to stop letting his eyes drift and focused on her. “Hey, sorry I keep going on little tangents like that. I didn’t have anything to do on the walk home besides worry about how you’d react to the news and philosophize. But, uh… yeah, in summation, if you decided to quit the force tomorrow, I would not think of you as a hypocrite. Because you wouldn’t be one. In fact, if you bailed on being a cop now after all you’ve done, I’d consider that a massive showing of emotional strength to be able to bring yourself to make such a tough call. Alright, sound good?” he beamed. “How ya feeling now?”

And she was frank with him. “Wait, uh… are we… are we  _ only _ talking about the choice of me quitting my job or not?”

Well, she wanted him to be speechless, and this was the closest she’d gotten so far, because he was  _ not _ expecting that. “What… what else would we be talking about?” he asked.

“Y-you know… we’re not gonna want to stay together if we disagree with this--”

“Wait, is THAT what you thought!?”

“...Isn’t that what you were hinting at?”

“Oh, no no no no  _ no _ no no no no! Is that… Christ alive, that’s really what you thought I was getting at, didn’t you?”

“Well, yeah, you were saying things like ‘I know this is gonna be a painful decision’ and… and ‘I can’t fight this battle with you anymore,’ it really sounded like you meant disagreeing on this would be a dealbreaker--”

“Oh, my fucking  _ God! _ ” he said with a nervous chuckle as he threw his head back and stared at the ceiling while running his hands up his forehead. “Yeah, I know I’m swearing like my parents, but…  _ Jesus Christ! _ ” He chuckled at the absurdity again as he tilted his head back down to look at her. “No! No, I-- I think we’ve had a miscommunication error here.”

“ _ Communication _ error.”

“Well, there ya go! There’s another one! Man, my brain’s fried today…” he trailed off with more chuckles of disbelief. “No, no, I… I was never saying ‘my way or the highway’, I was just trying to… like I said, I challenged you because I respect your intelligence. I mean… if  _ you _ want to break up over this… shit, that’s your prerogative --  _ do _ you want to break up over this?”

“Uh… no-not if we don’t… have to?”

“Well, hell, there! It’s settled!” he exclaimed. “Though… of course… we can be honest, something may arise as a direct consequence of this disagreement and  _ that _ might inspire us to give up on one another, but… so far, I’m fine with living with this disagreement if you are. I mean, that’s what healthy couples do, right? They work  _ together _ to solve their problems, they don’t treat each  _ other _ like the problem, right?”

“I… I guess they do.”

Of course, now he was starting to overthink things himself. “But… again, in the interest of complete transparency… now I’m starting to wonder if this was less about you thinking  _ I _ wanted to break up over this and more that you subconsciously -- or consciously, I dunno -- that  _ you _ found yourself thinking that you don’t want to be with someone who holds these beliefs.”

“What!? No--”

“There’s that word again…”

“What on earth gave you that impression?”

“Uh, as I rewatch the play-by-play in my head…” he said as his eyes rolled back a bit and he seemed to have an inward focus, “...it was kind of, uh, what’s the word I’m looking for? ...Crap, I completely forgot the fancy word I wanted to use. But yeah, it didn’t exactly add up when you seemed to think I wanted to break up after I already professed my love for you while crying like a baby.”

Her eyes were wide open as she glanced down at the table. “Uh…” She had no intentions of saying anything more and was hoping he’d keep talking until he said something that acquitted her.

“I mean, I don’t mean to be accusational, but the thought did cross my mind, and it’d really reassure me if you just… refuted that.”

She looked up with a nervous grin. “You know, as much as I’ve been saying  _ what _ , you’ve been saying  _ I mean _ a lot.”

He shrugged coolly as ever. “Eh. We all have our nervous tics. So you’re really going to avoid the question, huh?”

“Pretty much.” Jeez, that just slipped out.

“Ah… so… I see.”

“I-I mean--”

“Heh, now it’s  _ your _ turn to say  _ I mean _ .”

“Oh, shush. It’s been a long day and I don’t know where my brain is. You know what? ...Maybe. Maybe I did on some… subconscious level find myself thinking that I didn’t want to be with someone who thought my line of work was a… a tool for evil.”

“Well, for one thing, let the record show that I know it’s a lot more complex than that. To reiterate, in my mind, it’s not that policing is pure freaking evil, but it’s infected with enough evil and indifference that I don’t think that you and me’re capable of fixing an entire country’s public safety system from inside one department. Does that make sense? Do you understand my point?”

“I… understand it, but I think that you quitting is just… minimizing the number of good cops overall and… you know, what about all the little good things we do for the community?”

“The little things are nice, but I am of the opinion that they won’t add up to helping fix a broken system which I, in complete honesty, have absolutely no interest in being a part of any longer,” he said with a dignified air about him like he was lecturing at a conference of great minds. “But to recap… of course I would like you to agree with me, but I can live with it if you won’t, and the door’s always open for you to change your mind later.”

Now she was feeling a little more confident in this conversation since she knew exactly how to respond to this: “And the same to you. I don’t agree with what you’ve decided, but I’ll accept it because I know you’re a good guy, and… if you change your mind again, I won’t think you’re stupid for, uh… breifly changing your worldview after one of the most stressful days of work of your life.”

“Well, remember, I burned my bridges on the way out of there, so even if I changed my mind tonight, they’re not taking me back  _ INCONGRUOUS! _ ”

“...Huh?”

“I remembered the fancy word I wanted to use earlier, it was  _ incongruous _ ,” he said with a dopey grin.

“...Alright, then.”

“So…” he said as he rubbed his palms together like he was about to get down to business. “...you’re gonna stay on the force? Final answer?”

She knew her answer, but she took a deep breath anyway as if to give herself one last moment to let a change of heart come upon her; it never did. “Yeah… I can’t just… I can’t just tell myself that my goals can’t be done. That’s not who I am. And right now, my goal is… to use my position in the force to put an end to police corruption in this department, and hopefully to lay a blueprint for other departments to end the corruption in theirs.”

“Police corruption and  _ brutality _ .”

“I-- yeah, I included that in ‘corruption’.”

“Just making sure. Juuust making sure…” he trailed off as he slowly turned his head away, nodding thoughtfully. “Well,” he said as he looked back at her, “I can’t say I’m surprised. You always have been someone who can’t be told  _ can’t _ .”

“Even if that makes me naïve…”

“Hey!” he barked like a baseball coach. “...You’re only naïve until you succeed.”

She couldn’t help but chuckle at that one. “That’s… heh, I appreciate it, but jeez, that’s a cheesy one.”

“Hey, go easy on me, it’s a first draft of a motivational quote.” He felt like they were finally reaching a resolution, so he got out of his chair and started making his way around the table toward her. “So… I’ll support you in your journey to do what you think is right, and you’ll support me in mine, right?”

And honestly, part of her didn’t want to, but she found herself believing that the right thing to do would be to push past that part of herself and support the person she loved when he needed it, even if she didn’t agree with the conclusion he’d drawn, and she had a sneaking suspicion that he was having a similar thought process (a suspicion which was absolutely correct). “I… I guess that’s only fair, isn’t it?”

“As fair is fair!” he remarked and came up right next to her. “I don’t know how you’re going to single-handedly end police corruption, systematic bigotry, and this country’s cultural romance with law and order in general,  _ but! _ ” he exclaimed with a finger in the air, “...if that’s what you’re going to try to do, I will be your cheerleader.”

And she smiled. “Thanks, I’m… I’m gonna need it.”

And then, breaking out into a little dance and pointing playfully at her with the goofiest smirk on his face, he started singing the best he could: “ _ Oh, I think that you fouuund yourself a cheeeerleeeeader, nah-nah-naaah, nah-naaah, nah cheerleadeeer; oh, I think that you fouuund yourself a _ \-- c’mon, dance with me!”

He pulled her out of her seat and held her close as he danced a silly little dance, still singing, “ _ nah, nah, nah-nah-nah-naaah, nah-nah-nah-naaah-nah-naaah! _ ” all while she allowed herself to laugh out loud, which was something she wasn’t expecting that she would do that day.

“Put-- heh, put, put me down, put me down!” she said as she kept chuckling. “Put me down!”

He obliged, putting her back in her chair. “And you’ll be my cheerleader, right?”

“Of course!” she said, but then she realized something. “Uh… not to kill the mood, but, um… I gotta ask… what…  _ is _ your plan now?”

Hoo boy, just when he thought the talk was over. He went back to his seat as he said, “Well, first things first, don’t worry, I won’t be the lazy boyfriend who sits around the house collecting unemployment -- for which I’m not even eligible because I quit… oh yeah, pro tip, kid! If you do decide you want out of the force, try to get them to fire you so that you can collect unemploy--”

“Your plan, though?”

He hid his personal lack of direction with a self-assured-looking smile. “My plan is to make a plan. I had an enormous moral crisis today, too, remember? Gimme just a little bit of leeway?”

She nodded in mild embarrassment after coming across as a bit too accusational despite it being a valid question. “Yeah, uh… tha-that’s fair, um… you can take some time to think about it. Did you… have any ideas, though?”

“Ideas? Hm… I mean, I can think of a bunch on the spot, but I don’t know if they’re right for me yet… like, just like that chick from high school recommended: I could become a social worker, I could become a teacher, I could become a… shit, if I  _ really _ wanted to grow some balls, I could become a firefighter--”

“I think you’d look good in a fireman’s uniform,” she teased.

He scoff-chuckled through his nose. “Well I’m glad I got you feeling better enough that you’re in the mood to flirt with me. But yeah, I’ve got options on the table… I could even try to become a politician and purge corruption in politics while you purge corruption in the police! Might not be any harder than what you’re doing.”

“Hey, I’d vote for you! We’d be a one-two punch!”

“We sure would… and hey, worst comes worst, I could always get a regular job and do volunteer work on the side. I mean, think about it: a billion people on this planet seem to think the world was saved by a carpenter who just so happened to perform miracles in his free time!”

More nervous chuckling; “I suppose they do.” It wasn’t that she was nervous anymore, not exactly, but although she couldn’t form the words yet, there was a thought germinating in the back of her mind that something about smiling on a day like today just didn’t feel…  _ kosher _ . “Hey, as long as you don’t go back to being a shady businessman!”

“Hey, why shouldn’t I?” he asked, feigning offense for comedic effect. “It could be the perfect set-up! Instead of being like, uh… um… what’s his face? Uh… aw, God, I am drawing a  _ complete _ blank on the guy’s name. I oughta ask that British guy my brother knows, he’d probably know, he was basically his inspiration in life.”

“Who’s name are you trying to think of?”

“Who’s the dude from way-back-when who stole from the rich and gave to the poor?”

“...Jesse James?”

His face twisted at that answer. “Jesus, you really  _ are _ from out in the boonies, aren’t you?”

“Guilty as charged. But, uh… what makes you say that?”

“Well-- I wasn’t thinking of Jesse James, but… sure, let’s use him. A-a-and actually, I don’t think Jesse James ever really gave the money he stole to the poor, but… screw it, whatever, let’s roll with it: how about instead of robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, I  _ be _ the rich who gives my  _ own _ fortune to the poor? Cut out the middleman, eh? Eh?”

“Sure, be a Bill Gates type! Start your own charity operation!” Jeez, now that feeling in the back of her mind was starting to grow stronger, that feeling of feeling guilty for… not feeling guilty enough?

“Right, minus the part where he was a cutthroat shark before like a decade ago.” Now he looked like he had something on his mind, but he found the words he wanted much more quickly. “I gotta say, though… there’s gonna be a lot… a  _ lot _ of people who’re still gonna be pissed at me for staying with you if you choose to remain a cop. Now… I’m gonna tell myself not to care what they think, because I know you better than they do and I know you’re awesome, but… the thought’s liable to cross my mind that… what the fuck was the point of me quitting if I couldn’t show you the light too? Like, hey, don’t get me wrong, I still respect your decision, but… yeah, I’m still gonna wonder if they’re right and I’m just biased because I have a personal connection to you. Because like I said, I care about what those people think inasmuch as… I wanna make the world a better place now, and as citizens of my world, they have a vote in what I should do. Does that make sense?”

“...Yeah.” She was honestly lost in her own thoughts at this point, trying to articulate that weird sadness inside of her which she paradoxically felt like she didn’t deserve to feel… but did deserve it because she didn’t deserve it.

“I’ll tell you what’ll make me feel better, though. If you can just confirm for me… that you’re staying on the force amid widespread calls to get you to quit… because you’re convinced that it’s the right thing for you to do? As opposed to just coasting along because you’re afraid to make a big change and give up on all you’ve worked for?”

“...Yeah… yeah, that’s right.”

He wasn’t wholly convinced. “Could you just say that for me? Like, as a complete sentence? It’d make a world of difference for me.”

She had to take a second to remember what he’d said because she really hadn’t been completely listening, but after a second, she said, “I… I am staying on the force… because I think it is the right and just thing to do -- for  _ me _ to do, not necessarily anybody else, but for me and who  _ I _ am -- and because I think I can do more tangible good for my community with the badge than without it. A-and I’m not just coasting along because I’m afraid of quitting. There, final answer.”

“Final answer, you say?” He looked to the side and shook his head jovially again because he knew he was about to make another dumb joke for the amusement of nobody but himself. “Regis, I think she may have just won a million dollars!”

And there. Again. Something about the way that he seemed to be enjoying himself at a time like this didn’t seem right to her. Well, then again, he was the one who seemed to be more distressed by the big picture, so one could say he’s earned whatever fleeting moments of happiness may overcome him, and similarly, his people were suffering out there in the world more than her people were, but then again, other people’s people were suffering more than either of theirs, so now she was kind of back to square one… and wait, where were these weird feelings of mistrusting joy earlier? Why were these feelings only here  _ now _ ? She thought she may have been beginning to put the pieces together for what she really wanted to say.

And he still had that smile on his face. That damned, winning, irresistible smile. “Anything else on your mind before we cook dinner?”

But she didn’t have her thought formulated yet, so she had to stall with dummy questions. “Uh… a little-- I’m a little bit worried about what the neighbors’ll think. ‘Cause, y’know… cop-heavy neighborhood--”

“I have an answer for that!  _ Fuck _ what they think! If they’ve got a problem with it, I’ll tell them that I quit the police specifically  _ because _ I’m more of a patriot than they are, and I’m protesting a broken system until it’s fixed, thereby making my country a better place to live! For  _ everyone _ . And if  _ that _ still doesn’t work on them -- and pardon the vulgarity -- maybe this’ll work on ‘em.” And he stuck his tongue out, stuck his middle fingers in the air, and proceeded to pump his arms while blowing raspberries to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner”.

And there he was being a goofball again when he was the one who said twenty pages ago that this was a time for serious chit-chat on one of the darkest days he’d ever witnessed. And yeah, she’d told him to knock it off with the jokes, but she felt like she was somehow sharing responsibility in engaging in inappropriate behavior. Kind of like she had implicitly suspended the moratorium on happiness when she allowed herself to crack a smile at those stupid bits he threw into his attempts at serious conversation to, as he put it, preserve his sanity. But she still couldn’t quite articulate what she felt the problem was.

Meanwhile, he could just look at her and see her inward focus and he knew that she was having paragraph-long thoughts about something that was eating her up inside. “You alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said with enough energy and a straight-enough face to almost sell what she was saying.

“You don’t look fine.”

“Oh, I’m just… tired. Brain not firing on all cylinders.”

“...But you’re sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, I mean… we had a conflict, we had an adult conversation about it, we learned about one another, and… I think we’re better for it. I think we came to a resolution.” Which, as far as she could tell, was true.

He didn’t know what else he could do if she wasn’t giving him anything to work with, so he was going to have to take that at face value and hope for the best. He got up off his chair and patted his palms on the table. “Alright, well, in that case… I’m glad we had a happy ending! Cool, so what’s for supper? Carrot stew?”

_ There. _ There it was. “Wait.”

He was kind of expecting that, but nevertheless he had no idea what kind of thoughts were behind it. He got back in his chair. “I’m listening?”

As if to glean its wisdom, she glanced at the table one last time before she asked plainly: “...Are we  _ allowed _ to have a happy ending?”

Well, his smile was gone again, and his face looked about as distressed as hers did. “Huh… well, then…  _ there’s _ a question,” he said to the table.

“Because… I-I’m just gonna say it. People are  _ dead _ . People are dead, and a lot more people are going to die or get hurt before this is all fixed. On both sides of the line. And--”

“And because you’re a cop from a demographic that doesn’t get messed with disproportionately by the police and because I’m an ex-cop who’s from a demographic that  _ still _ doesn’t get messed with by the police as much as some other people, it would be so easy for us to have ourselves a nice little happy ending while the rest of the world suffers around us and we can more or less completely ignore it, right?”

“Uh… yeah, that too. Kind of like it’s not my  _ place _ to be happy right now. Because… jeez, we haven’t solved anything yet -- we’ve  _ re _ solved  _ to _ solve this, both in our own separate ways, but… I-I… I honestly feel like I’m not allowed to be happy for even a moment until I finish what I’m setting out to do.”

He pursed his lips and nodded to the side, deep in thought. “Fair point… fair point. Well… I can say this much: you and me need to be at least  _ kind of _ happy. Because -- man, this ain’t the most politically correct thing to say, but… sad people don’t change the world. And to you right now and anybody else who looks at the world and feels bummed out, that’s completely reasonable; there’s plenty of reasons to be sad right now. But we can’t be sad  _ one hundred percent of the time _ , or--”

“--or we’ll never get anything done because we’re moping around and we lose faith in ourselves and the world and… stuff.”

“E-exactly! We can’t be…  _ consumed _ by our sadness -- at least not all the time. Like, yeah, in moderation, it’s healthy to acknowledge that you feel sad--”

“I-- I get it,” she interrupted. “I-I’m sorry to cut you off like that, but you don’t need to explain your entire… worldview, I guess, to me. I already know how you feel about this.”

“Yeah, and I know you probably do, but… I dunno, I just feel better reexplaining in case you forgot or stopped believing me somewhere along the line,” he said to his own lap with a dash of shame. “Plus, I’ll be honest, I always feel like I gotta explain my full and unedited opinions when I’m talking about touchy subjects, almost like… I dunno, like just in case somebody might be listening to this conversation, and they hear me say something that sounds shitty out of context and then they wonder who I really am and what I’m all about.”

“...Who on earth would be listening to us--?”

“Jesus, I don’t know! The police!? Did the department bug our house? Could be a valid question now that you’re setting out to shake up the status quo that they only exist to protect…” But then he smiled again. “...which transitions nicely back to what we were talking about.  _ You _ … whether you believe it or not… you’re part of the resistance. Now, some people might reject giving you that label because you’re still wearing that badge that symbolizes your allegiance to the oppressors, but… you’re undercover. Incognito. You’re on an express mission to weed out corruption in the police, in this city, then this county, then this state, then this country. Then possibly the world, and our stretch-goal’ll be outer space; society doesn’t deserve colonies on Mars if we can’t solve the problem of racist cops first. But you’re playing the long game, and you’re doing that by way of doing something that a lot of the people you’re trying to help may think is shameful on the surface, and the fact you’re willing to put yourself in that pariah position among the resistance is arguably an act of bravery in and of itself. You’re rubbing shoulders with the bad guys as a secret operative of the good guys; I know that and you know that--”

“--and if other people don’t care to take the time to get to know that, then… I shouldn’t care what they think, should I?” Now she was smiling again.

“Not in this regard, no. They might still dispense some valid points about other things, but on the topic of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it… no, you know yourself best. And you know just how much you’re capable of.”

She found herself playing with her mug of lukewarm tea, her hands refusing to be controlled as this talk was almost getting her giddy to go out and start doing some good; after all, doing good things was her favorite thing to do. “So you really think we qualify as the  _ resistance _ , huh?”

“Oh, absolutely. And in the resistance, there is joy, because we believe wholeheartedly that we’re gonna win this fight and we’re gonna make things better. Because if there were no joy in the resistance… what would be the point of resisting?”

“Alright…” she nodded, “alright, I… I think I can get behind that.”

“So I vote that we allow ourselves to enjoy those fleeting moments of laughter--”

“--Because boy howdy, we’re gonna need ‘em!”

“Amen to that.” He thought a little bit more before he added, “But your point about how this shouldn’t be a happy ending kind of still stands, but… what if… what if we shouldn’t be treating  _ happy _ as the operative word?”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“What if instead of a happy ending, this is a happy  _ beginning _ ?” he asked with a look that invited her to feel glad. “And it’s happy because we’re setting out to do great things that we know we can do.”

But she had a better one for him: “You know what?”

“What?”

“Maybe… we shouldn’t be thinking about this in terms of happy or sad. Maybe… maybe what we  _ should _ be calling this moment… is hopeful.”

“Hopeful!” he beamed. He got out of his chair and started pacing the kitchen gleefully. “A  _ hopeful _ ending to this conversation! I love it!”

“I mean, I was thinking more of a hopeful  _ beginning _ to what we’re gonna do! It works both ways!”

“Splendid! So we stand resolved: with all the due respect to everything happening out in the world right now, we’re not ignorantly happy, but  _ hopeful _ that we can still make good come out of all this ugliness yet! Does that sound good? Does that sound like something the ghosts in our house listening in on us would think is a fair statement?”

She allowed herself to chuckle. “I sure hope they will, because I do!”

And before they wrapped it up, there was one last thing he wanted to say but hadn’t had a good chance to say it, something that may have sounded corny to some but goddammit he liked it and he thought she’d like it, too. Besides, only a cynic could deny that something corny could be beautiful from its sheer genuinity, and he didn’t want to be a cynic anymore.

He looked her right in the eyes with that same warm smile that she loved as he walked slowly back to where she was sitting. “And I, for one, am hopeful that… if you follow your moral compass… and I follow mine… and even though at first our paths will diverge and we’ll no longer be right next to one another, we’ll know that deep down we’re still with each other, lockstep all the way, believing in our hearts that our different compasses will lead us to the promised land where there’s no more pain and suffering and where we can be happy together without feeling guilty… and after it all, even though we took separate paths, we’ll still --  _ hopefully _ … we’ll meet each other there in the end.”

At the moment that last syllable escaped from his lips, he had arrived immediately right next to her chair. And as she looked up at him from her seat, she didn’t say a word. She only slipped out of her seat and buried her face into his chest and let herself fall into his arms. He could have been wrong, but it certainly seemed to him like she’d liked it.

\--IllI--

They awoke before the late-summer sunrise. As she got ready for work, he stayed in bed, watching her get ready, and she made it perfectly clear that she wouldn’t be offended if he went back to sleep after she left. Before she departed, they kissed like naughty schoolchildren, and he wished her luck in accomplishing all that she set out to do that day, and for luck that for the love of God she would be safe, and that she wouldn’t be forced into a position where she would have to make another person unsafe. She wished him sweet dreams as she walked out the door, assuming that he’d fall back asleep shortly afterwards, but there was no way that he’d be able to relax his mind now that he was awake again.

He was worried for her. Yes, he was worried about her safety, and yes, he was worried about her participation in an institution that he and many others no longer believed was a force for good. But he was also worried about what would become of her in the coming days and weeks and months and years if she couldn’t make the progress she expected of herself in reaching her goal; he worried what would become of that sweet, sunny woman he loved if she found herself in a situation where her hard work refused to pay off. He truly did believe that if anybody could do what she was setting out to do, if anybody on this earth could actually solve nationwide police corruption from the inside, it would indeed be her -- but that was still a pretty big  _ if _ .

But hey, maybe he just wasn’t putting enough faith in her; as she’d said, she’d already accomplished something almost as unlikely and impressive once before, so perhaps she had more of a chance at tackling this than an outside observer might think. Then again, he’d survived much of his life under the wisdom of his gut, and when his gut told him that what she was trying to do was a fool’s errand, he wasn’t exactly eager to disregard its assessment.

And still part of him worried that quitting wasn’t the right move in the big picture -- not because it was the wrong move for  _ him _ , he was sure that it was the right choice on a personal level, but because he didn’t know if it was the right move to leave her there to fight by herself; after all, she was always quick to tell people that she couldn’t have saved the city the first time around without his help. Oh, but someone whose heart just wasn’t in it is no use to anyone, and as unhelpful as that assessment may be, he couldn’t argue with it. Whether he should have tried to force himself to change his heart or whether he should listen to it despite its pessimistic wayfinding was a quandary he could ponder while he was standing in the unemployment line.

Therefore he spent the day lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, letting his eyes glaze over until his vision was like static on a television screen, letting a thousand torturous thoughts scurry across his mind. He was going to go to a protest tomorrow; this really wasn’t one of those things where he told himself he was going to do something ‘tomorrow’ but he kept putting it off again and again until tomorrow never comes, he really was planning on attending a specific march at a specific place at a specific time on the next calendar day. He had already found it online the night before and when he found the energy to get out of bed, he was going to hit up some old acquaintances to see if they wanted to join him there; safety in numbers and all that, even though he had selected the specific protest because its organizers said they were committed to a peaceful demonstration and directed any prospective rioters who wanted to tarnish the movement’s reputation to find some other party to crash, so hopefully everything would go off without too much of a hitch -- at least not from the civilians’ side. And if he didn’t acquire debilitating trauma at tomorrow’s protest, he expected to get himself to another one in the coming days, and another one after that, and so on and so on  _ ad infinitum _ until justice was served. He wasn’t giving himself a choice; what would the point of quitting the bad side have been if he didn’t cross the line and join the good side? And he surely would have plenty of time in his schedule to attend these events because God knows that nobody was hiring during this biological apocalypse; honestly, he was less concerned about being maimed in the streets by a cop dressed like a soldier than he was about bringing home a mystery disease which might not immediately kill him and his girlfriend but might permanently hinder their respiratory system.

But today he was allowing himself one day to just lay down and breathe, and to be happy that he still had the privilege of doing so -- or if not happy, at least grateful. He also wanted to be home for her after her first day of work without him in years. Surely she would be feeling lonely today; surely she would want to see his face as soon as she got home. And surely she would want to vent after inevitably catching flak from her coworkers for being in a relationship with the pussy who quit the force.

Therefore he would wait for her; just as she waited for him to come home late from work yesterday, the least he could do was do the same for her. He would wait for her inside this house even if this day proved to be an even harder day than the day before and something kept her at work for much, much longer and she didn’t get home until much, much later than she should have; he didn’t care how late she came home, as long as she did come home, safe and sound into his arms. And if something struck her heart today that compelled her to come home early, he certainly wouldn’t have complained.

**Author's Note:**

> ...So I'm posting this on June 28th, 2020, which incidentally marks the four-year anniversary of the first time I saw _Zootopia_ , and I've gotta say, in light of recent events, I seriously cannot believe that as recently as four years ago Disney made a movie where cops were unambiguously the good guys -- or rather one specific cop and one guy who would become a cop as part of his journey toward becoming a good guy, but you know what I mean. Honestly, I was surprised they did this even back in 2016, and today when there's a tangible push to get all sympathetic portrayals of cops pulled from American television (that's kind of lost steam by now because it took me so long to write this, but I'd bet my bottom dollar it's gonna flare up again), the idea of _Zootopia_ being released in 2020 is quite frankly inconceivable to me. And let me be clear that this is nothing to do with my personal desires, but rather what I see in the personal desires of the American public; this really does seem like this is the first time in my lifetime that a majority Americans don't think cops are good people. Like Judy said, it's entirely possible that I just have a skewed sample, and even then there are some pro-cop holdouts, but honest to God, even the most apolitical people I know, online and IRL, are speaking out against police brutality and systematic oppression; you know shit's going down when that casual acquaintance from high school who sometimes posts edgy memes about starting a furry genocide suddenly takes up the mantle of becoming an anti-racist crusader.
> 
> And Disney's going to make a _Zootopia_ sequel in this new era? (*Googles it to double check*) They're gonna make TWO sequels to this movie in this new era!? Hey, I'd say there's maybe an outside chance the sequels get outright canceled, but I doubt that because Disney knows damn well that that whatever they put out's gonna make beaucoup dinero, though I'd still expect the finished projects to be massively retooled so as to better match contemporary sensibilities. A massive tonal shift for the second movie: you heard it here first, people. In fact, they could even include a conflict much like mine above and I wouldn't even think they ripped me off because honestly it seems like the logical progression of their characters.
> 
> But to wrap things up, I just want to reiterate that the preceding story was written solely to play with the concept of two very specific fictional characters and how they would fare in the current zeitgeist given their very unique situation. This is not to be taken too seriously and it's certainly not meant to be interpreted as something worthy of being included in the real-world discussion of "what the fuck are we gonna do with the institution of the police?" Man, somewhere out there, somebody's probably already tried writing a piece of fanfiction with the expectation that it would be lauded the world over as a brilliant and relevant piece of social commentary on a contemporary issue. I can see it now; the poor, poor dear.
> 
> Well anyway, that's my time and I need to be getting off the stage. I hope you enjoyed and maybe I'll see ya around. Peace and love, everyone.
> 
> -Dobanochi
> 
> #BlackLivesMatter


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